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...

[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.