Information is Power

An interesting suggestion from Alan Mitchell in his Marketing column about how businesses can strengthen relationships with customers by handing back the data they already hold about a customers’ choices – what he calls Personal informatics.  Amazon and other online suppliers already provide a summary of our transaction history, accompanied by helpful suggestions about what we might also find interesting or enjoyable.

We often get paranoid about the amount of personal information held by commercial companies, but the irony is that in many cases, brand owners know far more about our  preferences than we do – such is the disengaged way that most of us shop, especially in supermarkets – and much of this information could be extremely useful.