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Future Enterprise- Biometric Marketing
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
A biometric is a unique physical or behavioural attribute that can be used to identify an individual uniquely. By applying biometric technology to online marketing, the user can be uniquely identified and associated with an individual consumer profile. Increasing interest in biometrics has led to rapid improvements in technologies with better performance, faster transaction speeds and lower costs.
Better internet identification will not only allow marketers to profile individuals more precisely but at the same time reduce the invasiveness of unnecessary and inaccurate advertising. The success of customer relationship management applications over the last decade has provided strong evidence that more personal profiling of customers provides a significant competitive advantage.
Biometrics encompasses a variety of techniques both old and new, designed to accurately identify an individual including- fingerprinting, facial recognition, retina blood vessel patterns, DNA sequences, voice and body movement recognition, handwriting and signature recognition. Examples of advances in biometric technology include devices such as a biometric mouse that offers a fingerprint reader and the capacity for collection of specific user clickstream data for statistical analysis.
While a marketer can measure the number of hits a web site receives, it is impossible to know the real needs of the consumer performing the search unless a variety of additional profiling techniques such as Computational Intelligence- CI are applied, based on adaptive feedback and and uncertainty modeling. CI methods include- fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm optimisation, machine learning and self-organising maps.
Narrowing the uncertainty knowledge gap for online consumers also involves applying several tracking methods during web site visits, including the use of smart cards, tokens, credit cards and digital certificates, to provide the means to correlate a consumer with an online system. But all methods suffer from uncertainties and lack of reliability in achieving precise identification. For example, because a biometric sensor will never capture the exact same data twice, the matching of biometric features requires additional fuzzy logic comparison.
It is now realised that the best approach to minimising error in the validation process is by multimodal identification. Each individual biometric measurement has an accuracy limit, but by cross-checking and amalgamating four or five different characteristics combined with CI analysis, a person’s physical and behavioural profile can be more accurately defined.
Future Trends
With increasing need for id and verification requirements as well as improvements in technology, there are likely to be many more biometric applications in the future. But the success of biometric monitoring and marketing will also depend on the establishment of trusted third parties such as Verisign to gain consumer confidence by ensuring private information is securely and confidentially maintained.
It is clear that future research into the use of biometric technology in online marketing applications must consider not only technological feasibility but also its social and legal acceptability.
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