How to piss off your customers in a Tesco stylee

Davide Cushman at FasterFuture blog spot gives us a real example of how not to talk to your customers and how not to use data within a marketing context.

welcome to Tescopoly

A friend of mine recently received a polite but threatening letter from Tesco because she had parked in the car park at their aircraft-hangar-of-a-superstore at Barhill, near Cambridge, for more than the time Tesco had calculated it was reasonable to shop (I think their limit was/is 4 hours).

This is a car park that's shared with other retailers, by the way.

Let's think about that for a moment. Tesco used a camera to record her arrival and departure from this car park, a camera with numberplate recognition - and one which is presumably connected to a computer which can both generate nasty automated letters AND find your home address, based only on your registration number, to send the nasty letter to.

Did you know Tesco had the right to your address simply because you choose to drive into their car park? Neither did I.

Such Big Brother tactics are somewhat predictable and depressing, talking of depression did you also know that people are more depressed shopping in Tesco than any other retail store in the UK?

Comments

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Alan

Good posting and great blog by David. I totally agree, and I think its a good example of how new technology will not be inherently good or inherently bad, but rather how it will be used.

For example the UK is one of - if not the world's most - densely populated country with surveillance cameras. And then when the abilities came for license plate recognition from surveillance cameras, it would allow such innovations, as London being able to track all licence plates of cars entering the Congestion Charge zone, and then billing drivers a fee who hadn't paid the congestion charge (some would argue this is a good thing).

Now the same technology is used to harass Tesco customers.. Shame on Tesco, shame!

Incidentially the current Economist has a story about profiling and data mining by government, and the BBC has a special about it relating to air travel etc. This kind of automated "big brother" behaviour is clearly spreading with the advances in technology. I'm really concerned with all the blogs and writing and comments and emails that some day some dumb computer puts some silly profile together with my travel patterns and suddenly I am on some watch list unable to travel etc...

Gotta be careful, digital footprints and all, eh..

Tomi :-)

[Replica watch]

my comment got eaten. Anyway I wanted to say that it's nice to know that someone else also mentioned this as I had trouble finding the same info elsewhere

[WilliamJonas]

Good posting and great blog by David. I read & appreciated.

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