Profiting from the Data Economy: Understanding the Roles of Consumers, Innovators and Regulators in a Data-Driven World

5. Today’s Data Economy

In the previous chapters, we discussed how organizations are leveraging the data exhaust generated by consumers. Business practice has been refined because of the level of granularity available in current data. Why settle for targeting customers based on their demographic information or all customers in the same region when I can hone in on those customers who have revealed themselves to be interested in my products? Although discussions about the use of detailed data from individuals are entering the popular vernacular, these practices are not new. Data brokers have operated in this fashion for some time by collecting data from disparate sources and repackaging the data for use by marketers of all stripes, whether it ...