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The Convergence of Solicitation and Sales: Point-of-Sale Technologies
For consumers, this real-time and networked computer system of tracking inventory, sales, and consumer behavior is increasingly visible at the point of purchase (POP) or point of sale (POS). POP or POS advertising and marketing techniques are strategically placed in retail contexts. Point-of-purchase advertising, for instance, might include illuminated store front signs. Ben Menin,A. E. Benning, and Lee E. Benning (1992) also point to the double-sided curbside ice cream sign as a popular technique of retail advertising in the years preceding World War II. In the United States, wooden Indian statues similarly adorned the sidewalks in front of tobacconists from the years 1840 to 1880 (Offenhartz 1968). In contemporary retail sales, Menin, Benning, and Benning offer a hard sell of POP techniques by arguing that such in-store advertising frees up sales staff, who need not explain products to customers, and enhances the overall aesthetic or image of the store. In relation to larger marketing campaigns, Menin, Benning, and Benning (1992, 23–24) further note that point-of- purchase advertising also facilitates in-store live demonstrations or sampling of products.
Facilitated by UPC and OCR, point-of-purchase techniques were designed to save time and improve price accuracy at supermarket checkout stations (Ing & Mitchell 1994). In the past decade, however, point-of-purchase technologies have been employed for more than simple advertising and sales personnel matters. Employing magnetic-strip technology, Citicorp’s POP system provides a scannable customer card for supermarket checkouts. Citicorp uses the collected data—the history of the consumer’s purchases—in a subsequent direct-mailing program that includes customized coupons marked with a household ID (Birt & Cooper 1990). Catalina Marketing Corporation’s point-of-purchase system offers coupons at the checkout station that are automatically customized to a consumer’s buying habits. Catalina also offers its coupons on the Web (Gallagher 1996). Apart from checkout exchanges, point-of-purchase technologies also incorporate marketing campaign materials directly on or adjacent to products and services. ‘‘Display vehicles’’ such as props and dispensers, for instance, typically highlight a particular product in high-volume areas of stores. ‘‘Flagging devices’’ similarly hold or dispense coupons at eye level in aisles (Menin, Benning & Benning 1992, 150–159).Ironically, one initial concern about the UPC and the computerization of inventory centered on consumer confusion over prices. With the removal of price labels, producers worried about retaining their customers, particularly given the increased availability of competing products and services (Harrell, Hutt & Allen 1976, 7). Today, however, wholesalers and distributors seem to complicate their bottom lines to automate customer feedback within demo- graphic and psychographic databases. Direct TV’s 18-inch digital satellite system, for instance, retails for an ‘‘end cost’’ of $49—that is, of course, after a consumer has purchased a one-year subscription package and mailed in a rebate coupon worth $50. The fundamental advantage to the cash-back mail-in coupon is that producers can construct their own consumer databases, thereby bypassing the marketing techniques of their retailers. Montgomery
Ward offered a sizable $50 mail-in rebate on many of its products. Long before receiving their rebate checks, however, consumers were mailed a questionnaire soliciting their opinions on the pricing, quality, and delivery of their purchase. Although one could argue that such solicitation techniques are not obligatory or fully automated, the high rebate amount certainly offers a strong incentive for a customer to provide demographic data. To a lesser degree, the customized questionnaire—with the name of the purchaser and the store and the date of purchase imprinted on the introductory page—reminds the consumer that the return of the questionnaire has its potential benefits: ‘‘Your opinion counts and could win you a big-screen TV! Completing this questionnaire and returning the postage-paid postcard, automatically enters you in a drawing to win a BIG-SCREEN TV.’’Point-of-sales techniques and strategies such as coupon-based campaigns or warranty cards are directed toward building or maintaining a ‘‘relationship’’ with consumers. Deighton, Peppers, and Rogers (1994, 60–63) note that such ‘‘Retention programs try to keep customers loyal, [whereas] . . . reacquisition programs to try to retrieve customers who have defected.’’ Examples of relationshipbuilding programs include frequent-user programs (typically employing the aforementioned preferred-customer cards) wherein a consumer’s habits are solicited in return for rebates or other promises of financial return through sweepstakes and lotteries. Affinity clubs likewise attempt to foster an ongoing relationship with the consumer by offering specialized product services and advice. Kraft Foods, for example, provides the members of its Kraft Cheese and Macaroni Club a quarterly magazine entitled What’s Hot.
Thus, such customer-retention enterprises and campaigns, often facilitated by point-of-purchase techniques and technologies, largely avoid sending advertising messages to consumers who most likely (statistically speaking) have absolutely no interest in (or ability to afford) a particular product or service. Outside the spaces of consumption and sales, however, the ‘‘misdirection’’ of advertising is still commonplace. Moreover, this ‘‘waste’’ or failure of advertising is not simply akin to some objective ‘‘sacrifice’’ that customers make in getting products not of their liking or desire. Rather, it represents the producer’s failure to reach a probable consumer. Since cost inhibits the individuation of advertising messages, market research has—since its earliest manifestations in the early twentieth century—focused on searching for and capitalizing on particular consumers. Yet how are such markets identified?While the nation-state is founded on abstract conceptions of citizenry, the techniques used to manage populations (and international relations) have always required knowledge of the available human and physical resources. Thus, citizens have always been required to contribute to a demographic knowledge base, in the form of a census, with census avoiders being subject to a penalty of fine or imprisonment. Hollerith reminds us, though, that as the tasks of governmentality became increasingly more complicated, they required faster and more efficient means of collecting, storing, and diagnosing data. The lasting utility of Hollerith’s tabulating machine was its ability to rationalize relationships between pieces of data and thereby provide condensed pictures or profiles of particular groups and places. The widespread use of statistics in the 1940s further introduced techniques of sampling into processes of solicitation.With a census taking place every decade, the U.S. government continues to archive and disseminate a seemingly incomprehensible amount of information. The government and many of its arm’s-length apparatuses (particularly the military) have provided a good deal of leadership in the area of technological innovation. Complementing its function as provider of data services, the government has facilitated computerized data analysis of consumer marketing practices in production, advertising, distribution, and sales. Foremost in this regard is the application of real-time database technologies in the airline industry, which enable the immediate storage, retrieval, and updating of passenger and scheduling data. The convergence of storage and diagnosis technologies in computers (as software programs) subsequently facilitated the ongoing computation of relationships between changing inventories, sales, and consumer demographics and psychographics.
While the need to make immediate changes to databases is restricted to large-scale or emergency service providers such as government and transportation, the cross-referencing of inventories and consumer demand is also of prime importance for wholesalers and retailers. Implementing a strategy similar to that used by the airline industry, with the assistance of digital technologies such as Universal Product Codes (bar codes and coded ‘‘swipe’’ cards), the retail sector has incorporated inventory tracking within sales decisions. Unlike the airline industry, though, the retail and wholesale sales industries involve a wide array of commodities, and for businesses to remain profitable and competitive, managers must devise strategies to solicit psychographic profiles of consumers that predict their likelihood to be interested in product X, Y, or Z.As this chapter has discussed, a key element in rationalizing overall business decisions and in discriminating consumers into niche markets is the technological automation of demographic and psychographic data. A distinguishing element of the sales transaction is the production and exchange of transaction-generated information (history of a consumer’s buying habits) in return for a financial rebate or a promise of reward. Money, in other words, is not simply exchanged for products or for libidinal gratification, for that matter. Once a larger pool of transaction-generated information has been cross-referenced and tabulated in consumer databases, profiles are used to target probable consumers at home (via direct mailing) or at the cash register (customized coupons). Market researchers are interested in finding out what the customer wants, but they also want to use data on consumer behavior to foster, automate, and network the act of consumption.
By tracing the emergence of automated computer and information technologies into the spheres of production, promotion, and wholesale and retail sales, this chapter has argued that consumer feedback has increasingly become an integral part of ongoing, real- time (and just-in-time) technological loops. And as these strategies become more pervasive and automated, they subsequently become less distinguishable from the act of purchasing or (keeping in mind the tactics of coupon rebates and bar-coded supermarket cards) getting a ‘‘good deal.’’ Such feedback does not simply inform the production of commodities, offering objective input on desired products for individual consumers. Rather, feedback techniques are often used to cluster like-minded consumers together so that their aggregate purchases—and hence psychographics—can be cross-referenced with production, distribution, and sales data. As is shown in the next chapter’s discussion of geographical information systems (GIS), the cross-referencing of data is often spatialized and mapped (just as Herbert Hoover intended with the first consumption census) to give industries in the private sector the intelligence required to reconfigure their operations to maximize their relationships to specific clusters of consumers. The mapping of consumer profiles in the context of the marketing and sales of products and services thus enters the domain of prescribing or otherwise governing spatial relationships.
