Japanese Video Chain Cashes in on Mobile Internet

Matthew Rothenberg writes: "CIO Insight has a case study that describes how Tokyo's Tsutaya video stores are tracking their users' shopping habits in real time via NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode wireless services and devices. 'We're not interested in merely renting videos to people,' Tsutaya founder Muneaki Masuda says. 'We're collecting lifestyle information, and the possibilities of that are, over time, enormous.'"

Comments

At what point...

[banky]

At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?

Re:At what point...

[foobar104]

At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?

Think of it like evolution. Once you get so old that you can no longer reproduce, natural selection doesn't care about you. You're outside the system. The same forces act on you, but your success or failure has no effect whatsoever on your species.

Same thing with advertising. If you don't participate in the see-buy cycle, then you're outside the system. You still get advertised to, but your choices have no effect whatsoever on your market segment.

In other words, as long as there are enough people out there who respond positively or neutrally to this type of thing, then there's a good reason to keep doing it.

Another analogy. People hand out flyers on street corners because, although 90% of the people may ignore the flyers, 10% of the people may respond to them.

On the other hand, if that 90% of the people, instead of ignoring the flyers, punched the flyer-hander-outer in the nose and burned down the flyer-hander-outer's store, you'd see a sharp decline in flyer-hand-outism.

Re:At what point...

[sabinm]

Unfortunately, were applying western thought to a very eatern culture. Japanese do not have the same feeling of privacy. Loudspeakers in public places "encourage" people to go to bed in some areas of Japan. The "annihilation of self" or the sacrifice of self for the good of the group is a prevalent ideology in Japan and other eastern cultures and I'm assuming that they would not be too put out by having their information transmitted to a potential supplier of wares, goods, or serivces.

Re:At what point...

[Bodrius]

At what point will people realize that lifestyles are not globalized by any means yet, and that part of the difference is the level of willingness to share that kind of information.

I'm not surprised this would work in Japan. Japan is "consumerism 'done right'", where 'done right' means there are no compromises. We're talking about a culture that has underwear vending machines, corporations live in a comfortable mercantilist marriage with the government, and the idea of opposing a keiretsu makes as much sense as voluntary amputation.

This doesn't mean it can work in the US, or many other places.

The fact that it may not work here doesn't mean it won't work there, either. Not every culture puts that much value in "privacy", not even the US's, and you require a very significant demographic actively opposing this, or your privacy advocates will end up being tomorrows "sovereign citizen"'s movement.

Now that sales are tracked...

[gpinzone]

...will this mean less sales of bukake films or more?

Not as nefarious as it seems at first glance

[spun]

WHAT?!? A company where people can voluntarily sign up for membership is actually using that membership to track what they buy? And then turning around and using that information to target ads to those members? How innovative.

Although the article is more 'gee-whiz-ain't-it-great' than actually informative, it seems like Tsutaya is only tracking purchases at their stores and through their website, not somehow using people's phones to track everything they do and buy.

Does anyone actually believe there are ANY companies that have a club card that AREN'T doing this? It doesn't really sound like they are doing anything revolutionary.

Less worse than Amazon, probably...

[wirefarm]

I live in Japan and have been renting videos from Tsutaya for years.
In Japan, for a huge number of young people, the keitai (cell phone) is the primary phone - they don't have another one in their apartment.
So when you sign up at Tsutaya, they want your keitai number. Big deal. I'll bet Blockbuster has your phone number, too.
Over here, it used to be that your keitai number was also your email - 09012345678@docomo.ne.jp - most people have changed it to something a bit less spammable. (I don't know anyone who hasn't changed it.)
So, most likely, Tsutaya doesn't have any linked information, unless you've offered to link it for them via their website...

I just don't see how this relates exclusively to Japan or to advanced CRM or keitais: the same thing could have been done 100 years ago by your library using postcards.

Keitais are not so advanced here that they can tell when you are watching a movie or close to a store. Perhaps you get an occasional email on your phone. (I've never gotten one.) This is not particularly Big-Brother-ish.

Blockbuster already knows what movies you rent from them, what days you rent, how often you pick a foreign film, a soft-core, a sci-fi, new release, whatever. They also have your phone number and maybe your email, if you signed up for some promotion or "member's club" on their website.

This is completely a non-story.
Any website that ties browsing to any real-world activity can do this.
If blockbuster.com or bestbuy.com has a page where you can enter your personal info and you actually do, you can bet that you will be tracked in this way.
It's not really an invasion of privacy if you are opting in...

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo