Question

4. As the chapter states, “Defining and targeting your audience is the best way to ensure a match between the company’s product or service and the consumer’s needs.” It only makes good sense that a market-oriented company would want to know as much as possible about its target audiences in order to serve them better. Today, technology has the capability to provide an increasing volume of data that allows audience profiling to become more targeted. Technology-driven audience profiling includes demographics, psychographics, multimedia preference, and characteristics studies in its analysis arsenal. From an ad agency or marketing organization perspective, the idea is simple: the more information you can supply to the creatives the better. OK, so what’s wrong with the picture we just presented to you? There are most likely many faults; however, chief among them are concerns about data collection methods and information security. In other words, there is worry about privacy rights. To investigate this ethical issue, conduct research on the privacy rights of consumers. Specifically, examine privacy rights on the Web and company statements about how consumer information is used. Summarize your findings. Once this is done, summarize your thoughts on how researchers seeking audience profiles can honor consumers’ privacy rights and still conduct meaningful research.

Answer 1

Privacy right of Consumers is n when company used information disclosed by the consumer are being stored as a database by the company general information such as needs and liking of the consumers, their personal contact details, their behavioural reaction on advertising etc this data collected by the consumers are stored in database of the company which they further use for the research and marketing purpose or they used this database to sell it to third parties the privacy concern is this database can be hacked by any third party from the companies and the consumer personal information and gathering can be leaked out. Since there is a competitive environment in the business world companies use consumers information database for its market research purpose the consumer also trust it's producer and share their personal information to the company because of this trust the company use securit engineering system to protect consumers security.

The best way to protect the Consumer privacy is minimize data collection and retention company should take and keep the data from the consumer which is only being used to make the product or service. Many companies take etc information from the consumer which they think can be used in future research but here the do mistake this etc database can be stolen or can be leaked to the hacker and the consumer privacy can be at the risk.Company should secure the database and keep it secure. Companies should make a privacy policy and Show it to its consumers it act as a binding agreement between the company and the consumers in the privacy policy the business activities should be mention fully and properly. The company should provide a complaint forum to its consumers so that the consumers can ask company their privacy concern before hand and the company should revert them regarding their queries this develop a good way of communication between the company and consumers.

Example of The Company Kellogg's they had mentioned it's privacy policy they will collect personal information from the consumers such as personal name, phone no, E-mail address etc. They will collect demographic information and also non personal information they have a secured security system to protect their consumers privacy.

By above statement it can be seen the company can gather and keep it's consumers information and protect their privacy by proper lawful way and still conduct it's meaningful research.