Week 7 Reading Reflection

1. His entire idea of essentially categorizing people based on their shopping patterns as opposed to demographics stood out to me. I does not seem like a feasible thing to do. Although it may have a good yield, in terms of its results, it just seems far more difficult and costly to do to monitor individuals based on what they buy instead of a few keys factors like age, sex and economic status. The only way that I would see it potentially working is if customers have an "account" of some sort set up to track everything they buy when they buy it. Even then, however, that would mean customizing marketing techniques for every individual person. It seems very time consuming and would raise marketing expenses significantly.

2. One part that was confusing to me is how exactly a business how go about customizing advertisements to each individual. It seems too difficult to go through.

3. I would ask the author two questions: 1. Could this custom advertising be feasible for small businesses? And 2. If you could track shopping trends, wouldn't it be a good idea to include both demographics and shopping patterns instead of just shopping patterns?

4. I disagree when it comes to using shopping patterns in place of demographics. As I explained in my response to the first part, it would be very costly in comparison to tracking demographics. Secondly, demographics tells marketers the stage of life a person is in, what the general interests and trends are in that generation and the things that the majority of the population of that demographic are going through. For example, at this point, most of the baby boomers are going through retirement which tells marketers a lot about what they would be interested, or uninterested, in buying.