As everyone knows long gone are the days of a mass market with everyone knowing the price of any good for sale to the public. Want a new chair? Well look at a list of different companies and their prices for similar types of chairs.
Nowadays companies are indexing everything about us that they can through massive service input (ex. google, rewards programs at grocery stores) form personal profiles to give us prices and service options customized to us.
While the corporations are gaining much more sophisticated knowledge about the market, they are hiding more and more information from the consumer. And by segmenting the market (to the point where in the future it's not unlikely that we will soon be talking about segmenting to groups of 1) they are further isolating consumers and making them vulnerable to exploitation.
I wrote up a lot more on this but my touchpad deleted it. I think we have enough to discuss the effects of product customization, data mining, as well as the methods that companies are using to keep consumers uninformed.
Nowadays companies are indexing everything about us that they can through massive service input (ex. google, rewards programs at grocery stores) form personal profiles to give us prices and service options customized to us.
While the corporations are gaining much more sophisticated knowledge about the market, they are hiding more and more information from the consumer. And by segmenting the market (to the point where in the future it's not unlikely that we will soon be talking about segmenting to groups of 1) they are further isolating consumers and making them vulnerable to exploitation.
I wrote up a lot more on this but my touchpad deleted it. I think we have enough to discuss the effects of product customization, data mining, as well as the methods that companies are using to keep consumers uninformed.