Looking out for little brothers

Jay Raynor’s article in Sunday’s Observer retrieves Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) from the scenery of daily life and forces it to the front of our brains. Most of us are so used to the ubiquitous little boxes that we largely forget how much we are being watched. Britain is CCTV nation, Raynor reminds us.

This concern about state surveillance is justified. CCTV is widespread, intrusive and of dubious efficacy (1). Nevertheless, attention to state surveillance shouldn’t lead us to neglect the increasing level of private surveillance –a matter that grows ever more pressing as the amount of public space declines. Admittedly, the infiltration into consumer products of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips – tiny radio transmitters the size of rice grains – has attracted considerable publicity but, generally, the private surveillance of our lives seems to be of less concern. This is a mistake.

It seems that, as a society, our defensive gaze is still fixed upon the Orwellian state, the big brother watching our every move. Yet, as the journalist Simon Garfinkel wrote, the future we may be heading to is one in which ‘a hundred kid brothers’ monitor our every move. ‘Over the next 50 years, we will see new kinds of threats to privacy that don’t find their roots in state totalitarianism, but in capitalism, the free market, advanced technology, and the unbridled exchange of electronic information’(2).

Whereas the principal purpose of state surveillance may be motivated by relatively straightforward security considerations (and more generally the desire to better control their subject populations), capitalist enterprise has wider concerns. Private corporations already have significant control over the working population during working hours but this is insufficient for their requirements. While they control us as producers, it is also important that they control us as consumers. Since this cannot be done through direct coercion, it must be accomplished through more subtle means: marketing (3).

One of the key elements of marketing is motivational research: the commercial endeavour that allows companies to assess how their targets perceive their environment and make decisions about which products to buy. Researching these questions is all the more important since so many products are functionally equivalent – so merely describing a product’s features provides insufficient marketing edge. As Kotler and Armstrong’s introductory text to marketing describes, ‘companies and academics have heavily researched the relationship between marketing stimuli and consumer response. Their starting point is the stimulus-response model of buyer behavior’. How do people choose what brand of soap to use? Will a change in colour increase sales to women? Will a change in name make men more comfortable buying it? Understanding the factors and variables that come to bear on this process allows marketers to then intervene to change them. In fact, most products (into which one subsumes packaging, advertising, and pricing and promotion) nowadays can be more profitably viewed as bundles of marketing stimuli. They are engineered, generally from the conceptual change, to push the buttons that ring the tills. A Michael Dawson writes, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that modern corporate marketing has been a huge, expanding project of applied behavioral research, by far the largest in human history’ (4).

This manipulation requires a combination of efficacy and subtlety since, in order to work, marketing must be ‘effective enough to profitably alter product users’ behavior yet also subtle enough to avoid recognition and resistance’ (5). Until recently, gathering intelligence on consumer behaviour attitudes and decision making processes has been a relatively crude process,

‘In addition to convening focus groups and interviewing shoppers, researchers would lurk in grocery aisles, stopwatches in hand, to time how long customers looked at each product. They would trail alongside shoppers as they browsed, quizzing them on their purchases. Or they would pay select consumers to keep a diary of their shopping experiences’ (6).

Originally, the most commonly used tool was opinion-polling, as pioneered by men such as Elmo Roper and George Gallup. Following the Second World War and the explosive growth of marketing in general, techniques acquired new sophistication with the widespread use of applied psychology and psychoanalysis. One of the principal techniques, pioneered by the Austrian psychologist Ernest Dichter, was the in-depth interview, designed to ‘keep respondents under the surface of their awareness’ so that they could ‘project their own feelings on neutral stimuli’. This widespread application of psychology was successful. To give just one example, Miles Laboratories, makes of the well known Alka-Seltzer, were able to subdivide their potential market by personality type - with satisfactory (profitable) results. As their head of marketing at the time remarked, ‘We needed a great deal of psychology and whatnot in selling medicine. We’ve got to make them sick. We have to tell them they’re sick so they go ahead [and buy the product]’ (7).

To this day, psychology is one of the principal tools in marketers’ toolkit. Nevertheless, by the 1960s, corporate marketers began to realise that such in-depth techniques were insufficient and so they began to draw upon more research disciplines, such as sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, economics, and, later, semantics, communications theory and philosophy. The fruits of all these fields were yoked to a single goal: to describe, comprehend and, ultimately, manipulate consumer behaviour. As the management theorist Douglas McGregor had written 20 years earlier in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Our major aim is to be able to predict how human beings will behave, and through our skill in prediction to control behavior’. By the 1960s, corporate marketers were finally marshalling the tools to do the job (8).

Since the 1960s, marketers have become increasingly adept at mapping psychological research onto more conventional demographic categories. The result of this, psychographics, combines psychological data with socio-economic data to produce a more accurate method for segmenting the market and targeting groups according to their ‘attitudes, motivations, values, usage patterns, aesthetic preferences, or degree of susceptibility’. As Daniel Pope put it in his history of advertising, marketers ‘home in on consumers whose life-styles and personalities have been carefully profiled’. Needless to say, new technology has made these techniques all the more powerful (9).

And so now we come back to surveillance, since it is new technology – new surveillance technology – that is motivating what is perhaps the newest phase of motivation research: Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Surveillance in shops is not new but what is new is the move away from surveillance purely for the sake of security. Although the techniques are still in their infancy, it is reasonable to say that, very soon, most retailers will not be watching us just to make sure that we don’t steal their goods but to find out why we buy what we do. Since an estimated 70% of buying decisions are made in store, intelligence about our behaviour within shops is crucial to increased profits (10).

One of the pioneers of CRM, ‘retail ethnography’ as it is sometimes described, has been the Brickstream company, whose name –echoing the ‘clickstream’ technology that is used to track website traffic- is well chosen. When Brickstream launched in 2002, it promised to revolutionize

‘store design and space management processes by providing continuous and real-time insight into the effectiveness of store layout and product allocation decisions’ in order to ‘capture walking paths of customers through a store and [deliver] intelligence such as customers entering/exiting an area, high/low traffic areas of a store, velocity of customers in an area, sequence of customer activities, traffic patterns by time of day/week, and before and after comparisons’ (11).

This is accomplished by a system of ceiling-mounted cameras that track people in real-time. The individual shopper is identified by body mass or temperature and is ‘passed’ from camera to camera so their movements can be fluidly mapped. The touted practical applications of this included defining a zone within a store and then creating a rule that ‘if a customer remains in that zone for 15 seconds without interception by a salesperson, the system should alert the sales manager.’ Another was the ability to ‘set checkout line wait thresholds that trigger an alert to open another register.’ ‘We can tell if someone picks up a Coke, sees a sale sign, puts it back and buys a Pepsi. We can tell how many people pass by a certain cardboard display,’ reported the vice president of Brickstream Corp in 2002. ‘This technology can provide much greater insight into consumer behavior than our old way of doing things’ (12).

Since its launch, Brickstream has provided its system to a variety of customers, including Bank of America, Royal Bank of Canada, Wells Fargo, Fleet Bank and SunTrust. Its first UK customer was Lloyds TSB in 2004 who found, after a six month pilot, that the speed with which customers were served increased by 25%. Naturally, technology like this raised questions about privacy and the company was quick with its attempts to allay them, pointing out that their technology only filmed people’s head and shoulders and did not recognise faces. Indeed, Brickstream’s system can produce data by processing the images in real-time, so that no human actually sees the images recorded. Nevertheless, while the technology may (officially) have a light touch so far, common sense and experience tells us that it may not stay that way for long. One only has to remember that the 1984 guidelines for the deployment of CCTV recommended that they should ‘be used by the police only where they are necessary for the efficient conduct of police operations and with due regard for the intrusion of privacy that may result in particular circumstances’, and compare this with the proliferation described by Jay Raynor (13).

Inevitably, the sophistication of in-store CRM systems has increased. In January, Brickstream themselves announced new technology for capturing 3D images as well as innovations to make the system more compact and cost-effective. Indeed, more intrusive research has been conducted across the US for a couple of years. For example, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2002, surveillance also can be used to

‘gauge how shoppers react to specific products… if a woman dallies at a cosmetics counter, for instance, a camera might zoom in to capture her expression. Studying the video later, analysts can see whether she’s intrigued by a new shade of lipstick, struggling with a hard-to-open package or intently comparing prices. Cosmetics companies can then use these observations to refine their products or tailor their advertising’ (14).

Furthermore, more intrusive systems are practicable even if, so far, they have been used only on a small scale. Consider the ‘Once Famous’ boutique in Los Angeles, which opened in 2001 to act as a ‘retail lab’.

‘A subtle sign at the entrance warns shoppers when the lab is in “test mode,” and adds: “If you prefer not to be recorded, kindly visit when this sign has been removed.”…

‘For now, however, many breeze past without reading the warning–and never know that their every move, their every wistful stare and disdainful sniff, is being taped. Even those who do know say they soon get so involved in browsing–the merchandise changes almost daily–that they forget they’re on camera.

‘”They’re really unaware,” said Coco Sullivan, the store’s full-time sales associate.

Such surveillance is perfectly legal. Experts in privacy law say retailers are free to record, videotape or otherwise monitor their shoppers, except in areas considered private, such as fitting rooms. They are also free to do as they like with the data they gather–including sell it’ (15).

One of the essential characteristics of this technology is that it’s a continuation of the trend for identifying increasingly smaller subsets of the population. A few decades ago, market segmentation involved categorising a potential market along demographic lines. Now technology is allowing companies to target individuals. Consider, for example, the recent demonstrations, by the IT company Accenture, of what new surveillance technology could mean for banking. As one of Accenture’s partners, Michael Redding, put it last year, ‘One of the holy grails of banking is cross-selling. The more products a customer buys, the more profitable they are for the bank’ –hence the need to identify customers more effectively. Accenture’s solutions in this area really do evoke science fiction but all are perfectly within reach. They include putting RFID tags into credit cards so that banks can identify their existing customers as they walked through the door. As RFID tags get cheaper, they

‘could be implanted in leaflets. If a customer picks up a brochure about a mortgage, the leaflet rack records the fact. When the customer approaches a teller, he can propose a meeting with a mortgage adviser before the customer even asks.

‘The same technology can also be linked to an in-branch video screen. Once the screens know who is walking past, it can play a mortgage ad to the customer who just picked up the mortgage leaflet.’ (16)

All of these technologies are possible, practicable and several are already in service. Like CCTV, they have humble beginnings and are accompanied by reassurances that privacy will be respected and their use will be limited. Yet, as is so often the case, the gradual creep of corporate surveillance will be subtle and accompanied by lulling enticements. Indeed, one of the principal selling points of technology –that it will make life more convenient – is effectively enforced by efforts to make life inconvenient if you don’t acquiesce to it. Carrying an ID card at all times may never become technically compulsory, for instance, but you can bet that life will become so damn hard without one that it may as well be mandatory. It’s a reasonable surmise that the same silky manipulation that is used to sell us soap will be deployed to make us swallow increased corporate surveillance. As Michael Redding said, it has to be done ‘tastefully and sensitively’: ‘You could easily make people uncomfortable’ (17).

Indeed.

Notes.

(1) Jay Raynor ‘Pan, tilt, zoom’, Observer, April 2, 2006, available at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1742861,00.html; Although it adds a variety of caveats, ‘Assessing the impact of CCTV’ (Home Office Research Study 292) did report in 2005 that ‘the majority of [CCTV] schemes evaluated did not reduce crime and even where there was a reduction this was mostly not due to CCTV; nor did CCTV schemes make people feel safer, much less change their behaviour.’

(2) Simon Garfinkel (2001) ‘Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century’ p3. Also see ‘The Orwell Diversion’ in Alex Carey (1996) ‘Taking the Risk Out of Democracy’.

(3) Michael Dawson (2005) ‘The Consumer Trap. Big Business Marketing in American Life’.

(4) Ibid p. 58.

(5) Ibid. P. 54.

(6) Stephanie Simon, ‘Shopping with big brother’, Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2002, available at http://com.bradley.edu/faculty/lamoureux/website2/nmt/28/28b.html.

(7) Dawson, op cit. pp. 67-69.

(8) Quoted in Ibid., p 65.

(9) Daniel Pope (1983) ‘The Making of Modern Advertising’, p 290.

(10) According to Point-of-Purchase International, ‘the time pressure felt by many shoppers today has resulted in 70% of buying decisions being made in the store at the point-of-purchase’, quoted in ‘Brickstream Intelligence for Marketing Enables Shopper-Based In-Store Marketing for Consumer Product Manufacturers’, Brickstream press release, Business Wire, May 3, 2004, available at http://www.brickstream.net/about/about.php?page=newsPR.

(11) ‘Brickstream Corporation Launches Brickstream Intelligence for Space, Revolutionizing Store Design and Space Management’, Brickstream press release, Business Wire April 15, 2002, available at http://www.brickstream.net/about/about.php?page=newsPR.

(12) Simon, op cit.; Jeanette Burriesci ‘Camera Ready Brickstream analyzes video intelligence for retailers’ Intelligent Enterprise Magazine, March 28, 2002, available at www.brickstream.com/pdf/Intelligent%20enterprise%2003.28.02.pdf.

(13) ‘Brickstream Intelligence Helps Lloyds TSB improve Customer Service in Branches; Brickstream Solutions Now Available for all United Kingdom Financial Services Companies’, Brickstream press release, Business Wire June 8, 2004, available at http://www.brickstream.net/about/about.php?page=newsPR; Written Answers to Questions, Hansard October 20, 1989 (Column 265), available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/cgi-bin/newhtml_hl?DB=semukparl&STEMMER=en&WORDS=privaci%20cctv&ALL=&ANY=CCTV%2c%20privacy&PHRASE=%22cctv%2c%22&CATEGORIES=&SIMPLE=&SPEAKER=&COLOUR=red&STYLE=s&ANCHOR=Writtens-1_spnew48&URL=/pa/cm198889/cmhansrd/1989-10-20/Writtens-1.html.

(14) Simon, op cit.

(15) Ibid.

(16) Ben King ‘Accenture attempts to reinvent the bank branch - again’ Financial Times, October 5, 2005.

(17) Ibid.

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