One of the simplest ways to change personal consumer behavior, is to change the information available in the immediate environment. The best things I have done in the last few years is to no longer spend time reading the "news" daily, no longer spend much time in entertainment activities like watching shows and, putting a little label on the letterbox that says, "No Junk Mail".
While we think we are smart enough to beat the system, we are products of our environment and are heavily influenced by what we surround ourselves with in a, you are what you eat situation. Eat junk, get junk results.
Social media platforms do the same thing, by streaming various trends in order to affect the distribution of information and ultimately, behavior itself. It doesn't just influence the purchase of things, it is also the way ideas are bought and spread globally at a very fast rate. A lot of people seem to act as if they have no way to filter the information, as if they have no control over what they eat.
Quite a few people I have talked to like having the tailored adverts come through their feeds because they get "discounts" on products they were going to buy anyway, without recognizing that in all likelihood, there is no discount at all, as the product is marked up on the website they search and then a couple minutes, hours or days later, they will see an advert for the same product at 20% off. While this is a technical saving of 20%, in reality, if they had bought the product at the time they searched, they would have been paying the company 120% for it.
The company of course doesn't mind that, but being able to identify a customer through a search and then feed them a tailored advert saves them a lot more money than if they had to blanket advertise and hope the right people see it. Advertising is expensive, so being able to only target the people who are interested and can be nudged into making a decision is valuable.
Social media is able to not only target individuals, it is able to gather groups of individuals that can be used to not only sell products, but start, distribute and social proof trends themselves. This means that building a social network becomes an investment with a return, where there is the possibility to capture an audience and leverage it to lower the customer acquisition cost, as well as the time to value, where the project is to speed up the rate and amount spent by each customer.
It is in the ability to distribute information in order to affect behavior that holds the value in social networks, which requires the collection of data that can be used to identify and predict who will do what. An influencer for example isn't someone that the media labels as such, it is someone who is a point of contact for a wider audience and has the power to "suggest" a future action, increasing the value of their network. The content they post is only valuable to the point that it is a hook for potential change in actions.
We spent time at the neighbor's place today for lunch and we were talking about various things, including the state of the world, the economy and the continual need to spend money on something. There is always something more to buy, whether it is needed or not and while we think that we are making the decisions, we are not well equipped to see how affected we are by our environment in this area.
I find it interesting to listen as people talk about how they aren't affected by advertising, as it is so obvious, but also blame McDonald's and Coca-Cola for the obesity epidemic. If people are not affected, that means that the 70% of Americans that are overweight are overweight by choice - something that most of them will deny, yet also feel that they have agency over their actions in other dominions - like the way they vote.
People who are obese are more than twice as likely to wind up in the hospital with COVID-19 as those with normal weight, and 48 percent more likely to die from it, according to a study last month that looked at hundreds of thousands of patients. source
When it comes to the data on Corona for example, we are given totals, but not the granular cross-sections of the figures to have a good understanding of the real risks. The media however will be very quick to jump on and spread any story where a relatively normal or fit person has died from Corona - but it is this cherrypicking of information that ends up being spread through the social networks to polarize and create fear and it is because of this, that it is very, very hard to know the truth, even though the truth is out there.
We like to think that we know ourselves pretty well, but the truth is, that due to the amount of data that we provide on a daily basis personally, as well as through the averaging of the groups we frequent, the algorithms know us better. Not only that, they also know how to target us as individuals and groups, and have multiple ways to reach us, making "our" decisions and reactions, quite predictable. Even when we think we are acting against the norms, there is a profile for that too.
When it comes to consumer behavior, it really does matter to which groups you belong, as we are going to be affected by our peers in many ways - whether they are people in our immediate environment or, people we will never meet but gather together with on social platforms. The more time we invest into the group, the more influential they become over our future decisions, but we will say that we have made the choice based on our own interests, which is why we joined the group in the first place. But, we never see the silo and the changing of our behavior feels natural.
We have never had so much access to information before, yet we have probably never been so narrow in what we consume, as we can both pick and choose ourselves, as well as get influenced by algorithms that suggest content for us. Instead of having the junk mail arrive in the mailbox, it is delivered directly in front of our face a thousand times a day and even as we buy-in, we believe we have control of our diet.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]