Consumer Behavior

Continuing from my last post on "Active Design", an interesting article appeared in the NY Times on how more and more marketers are using consumer behavior rather than consumer perceptions obtained through market studies and then figuring out what fits their profile the best. Behavior based marketing is taking a step further and looking at what the consumer actually buys and identifying correlations to design the product offerings. In other words, if you know how your consumers "Acts" then you can design for her to act and offer her what she acts for. The article talks about the role of new media in helping identify consumer behavior and also market product offerings identified through an understanding of consumer behavior - "The ability of new media to monitor what consumers are doing — like keeping track of which Web sites they visit — is fueling the interest in behavioral targeting"