Discuss the pros and cons of allowing companies to amass personal data for behavioral targeting.

Answer:

Behavioral targeting is to identify consumers’ browsing habits to help company make qualified targeted decisions.

Pros:

(1)        Allow companies to better understand their customers: With the expanding of the Internet, customer demand is becoming bigger and bigger. Behavioral targeting helps market supply to keep consistency with market demand.

(2)        Behavioral targeting can anticipate the needs and wants of current clients and do a close match with the needs of future clients.

(3)        Behavioral targeting increases company productivity without spending too much money. In addition, it’s easy for company to relative information of customers’ behavior, because behavioral targeting includes such behavioral studying.

(4)        Be helpful to market research: Behavioral targeting helps marketers to do market segmentation. Companies make different marketing strategies according to different customer segmentation.

(5)        Behavioral targeting brings new strategies for online advertising, such as: street location.

(6)        Combined with line advertising tools, behavioral helps advertisers to know the exact person most likely to buy their product at the right time.

(7)        A win-win situation for both customers and advertisers: Customers are able to find ideal products within a shorter time, and advertisers can save more cost to advertise.

Cons:

(1)        Expensive: The cost of behavioral targeting is twenty to thirty percent more than the cost of other traditional online advertising strategies.

(2)        Don’t work for all kinds of product: Behavioral targeting is more effective for products without mass appeal, so it isn’t suitable for products, which target customers are senior citizens.

(3)        Privacy issues: For example: when the products and services offered by the company require privacy, a person may be annoyed and offended if he or she receives an email offering him those kinds or items and services. Behavior targeting should be liable to the harassment, because it records and leaks the customers’ personal information.

(4)        Problems with cookies and usernames: Some people will steal the customer’s user name and password, or even access and operate customer’s computer systems.

(5)        Problems with location-based marketing: Many customers don’t want to expose their location due to personal privacy and security.

(6)        Uneducated clients: Unqualified participants decrease reliability of behavioral targeting.

(7)        Limited reach: Timeliness of behavioral targeting is limited, because it is changed by consumer preferences rapidly.