Marketers get keen as to what drives women to shop based on habits.

Good and bad, everyone has habits. Flossing, exercising, online shopping, putting two teaspoons of sugar in your tea – the things we do on a daily basis end up shaping a large part of who we are, whether we realize it or not.

Habits used to be something we could keep to ourselves. If we liked to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every Thursday night, we were free to do that. Nobody else needed to know about it, save perhaps for the quasi-judgmental person at the cashier.

But increasingly, our personal habits – more specifically, data about what we buy and when we’re most likely to buy it – are sought after by retailers, marketers, and statisticians. And there is one group whose personal purchasing data is most desirable: working women aged 24 to 54.

A recent New York Times Magazine article highlighted the tactics that retail giant Target uses to tailor it’s marketing strategy to individual customers. The author, Charles Duhigg, provided the example of a fictitious shopper who, based on a complex set of algorithms created by Target’s mathematicians, had an 87 percent chance of being pregnant and due in August:

“Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug… Target knows [that if Jenny] receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.”

Duhigg goes on to explain how Target amasses information on individual customers by assigning each one a guest ID number. If you’ve ever used a coupon, visited a website, paid with a credit card, filled out an online survey, or opened an email from Target or a company like it, it’s likely you have a guest ID number as well. It’s also likely that Target is already sending you tailored ads and coupons for things they know will get you in the store, like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

As one columnist recently put it, “data is the currency of the internet.” The relationship between gaining access to our personal data and a company’s ability to boost profits is explicit and direct. A recent study found that increased government regulations on online privacy would result in reduced investment in and less innovation coming out of places like Silicon Valley, the nation’s tech-entrepreneurship capital.

So is it a bad thing if marketing firms and brands can anticipate our wants? If a runner does an online search for running shoes, wouldn’t a discount coupon for said shoes be beneficial to them?

Holly Buchanan is a marketing consultant and author who specializes in web-based marketing geared towards women. Buchanan says that when it comes to personalized marketing, a consumer’s reaction depends largely on the context in which they received the ad.

“For women who want a more relevant shopping experience, if your Amazon account suggests books you might like based on your past purchases, that’s helping to make your shopping experience better,” said Buchanan. “But what people get turned off by is the creepy factor. If you’re in Gmail and you get served up an ad based on content in a personal email. That’s creepy because you’re not in a shopping environment; you’re in a personal environment.”

The methods used by marketing firms to figure out what women want have progressed far beyond traditional focus groups. In addition to the habit-based research collected by large retailers like Target, Buchanan says other online marketing tactics include searching Twitter hashtags on a certain topic, reading personal product reviews on websites like Yelp, using targeted ads on Facebook, and interpreting website analytics to ascertain who is viewing what.

Google’s often criticized new privacy policy takes everything one step further by integrating the personal data collected across all Google products (think YouTube, Google+, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome) into one pool. Marketers can then use this information to customize ads across a wider platform.

There’s a reason, of course, why profit-seeking companies and eager marketers want women’s data specifically. Long known to marketers as CPOs or “chief purchasing officers,” women make 80 percent of the buying decisions in American homes.

“Women control so much [purchasing] power because so often they’re the ones doing the initial research,” Buchanan says. “As advertisers you have to get on her radar screen first in order to get his radar screen.”

An underlying maxim in marketing, according to Buchanan, is to go by what people actually do, rather than what they say they do. That is why data about female’s actual shopping habits, rather than data collected by asking women about their shopping habits, is so sought after.

“Any research you can do that measures consumer behavior versus what consumers say they do is incredibly valuable,” Buchanan says. “For women, there’s a lot of judgment in society (for mothers in particular), so they will tell you ideally what they’re going to do, but that isn’t necessarily what they’ll do.”

Image: tiseb

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The privacy watchdogs have been barking hard this season. In case you’ve been off-the-grid, here’s the controversy from the world of social media that preceded one perhaps even larger about DNA research…

This week, Facebook automatically gave its users’ personal information to sites like Yelp and Pandora. Now, you and your FB friends can see each others’ bitchiest restaurant reviews, and worst, one-hit-wonder indulgences whether or not you ever intended to reveal these to one another.

Last month, Google raised privacy concerns when it automatically revealed its email users’ closest contacts to the Gmail public, through the launch of its Google Buzz product. Google Buzz was supposed to have taken over Digg, Twitter, and everything else social media by now but hasn’t, quite partly due to public backlash.

Now, imagine it’s not your social map, preferred menu or your pop cultural sensibilities being scrutinized and seen by the public. This time, it’s your actual hereditary material! We’re talking public, deoxyribonucleic acid blues.

One Native American tribe, the Havasupai, sued and won their legal battle against researchers from the University of Arizona who were using their DNA to run tests for things the tribe never authorized.

According to several legal news sites, the Havasupai initially donated DNA samples agreeing to a project that was supposed to focus on their tribe’s high incidence of diabetes. But the samples kept getting tested. Other matters, besides diabetes vulnerability, became a question subject to the scientists’ inquiries including the tribe’s supposed geographical origins, and their collective mental health.

The environmental implications regarding how a specimen gets used are as staggering as the ethical and legal ones.

Fishing rigs in Japan, for example, may state and are authorized to fish for whales in order to study whale population changes and marine health, or to hunt whales within a quota. But they sometimes sell the whales they “accidentally” catch, or catch for “scientific study,” as whale meat on the black market.

Should they be allowed to re-sell the grand creatures they kill for food if the intent was scientific study? Isn’t it wasting them, not to eat them if they’ve already been hunted?

Or does a scientific and accidental allowance create a black market and culinary demand, as well as disrespect for endangered species?

Finally, if you gave your DNA up for one study, why not the other?

Use the links and resources below to get informed, and talk to us about how much intent matters when it comes to science and knowledge gains for the greater public. Comment below or holler on Twitter @ecosalon.

Basic Reading:

– “The geneticist responsible for the research has said that she had obtained permission for wider-ranging genetic studies. Acknowledging a desire to ‘remedy…wrong that was done,” the university’s Board of Regents agreed to pay $700,000 to 41 of the tribe’s members, return the blood samples and provide other forms of assistance to the [tribe]. Legal experts said [the settlement] was significant because it implied that the rights of research subjects can be violated when they are not fully informed about how their DNA might be used.” – Indian Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of Its DNA, a New York Times news feature

– A Discover magazine blog post asking what will happen to DNA samples that were gathered before the idea of consent was formalized in regards to DNA research, now that this case was won.

– “The vast majority of the world’s countries are against the killing of endangered animals in but Japan issues itself a “scientific whaling” permit using a loophole in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) bylaws to continue commercial whaling. Every year since the moratorium they escalate the “takes” or kills in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary to include more and more protected and endangered animals.” – A HuffingtonPost blog entry by Louie Psihoyos

Further Resources:

A privacy-focused blog that takes a strong side with the Havasupai tribe

Researchers’ perspectives on the matter of consent and DNA samples, via Swiss DNA Bank

Clashes between environmentalists and the whaling industry continue in New Zealand, a news feature at the New Zealand Herald

Image: micahb37

This is the latest installment of EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and trends by EcoSalon writer and columnist Lora Kolodny.

The post EcoMeme: Is Your DNA a Public Concern? appeared first on EcoSalon.