Here's the first question for the first case study (due next Wednesday, Feb 29).
Obviously, it requires a lot of reading, and a lot of thinking, before you can really start writing. Be sure to give yourself enough time to do a good (or great!) job on this assignment. If you leave it to the last minute, you might find yourself freaking out...
Remember, you need to submit both your answers to Turnitin. Also, you'll be using your code names on the copies you turn into me to grade.
Finally, please consider visiting the BBCC to sharpen up your answer to Q1; I guarantee it'll help you answer Q2 as well!
An article published this month in the premiere CB journal, the Journal of Consumer Research, is totally relevant to the material we've been discussing in class recently.
Here's the opening paragraph:
Stephanie, a first-year MBA student, is shopping for a new suit to wear
to her internship
interviews. She finds a suit she likes and decides to
try it on. As she approaches the dressing
room, she sees another
customer standing in front of a three-way mirror wearing the same suit
she has in her hands. The customer is beautiful and looks stunning in
the suit. Stephanie tries on
the suit, is not satisfied with how it
looks on her, and decides to keep looking at another store.
The question we examine in the current research is whether or not Stephanie’s
evaluations of the
suit would have been different had she not seen the
other customer wearing it and what factors
might influence this social comparison process.
From "Social Information in the Retail Environment: The Importance of Consumption Alignment, Referent Identity, and Self-Esteem," by Darren W. Dahl, Jennifer J. Argo, Andrea C. Morales
If you're on campus, you should be able to link to the full-text article seamlessly. If you're off-campus (or if the on-campus link is sticky), you can access it through our wonderful library website (note: you have to log into the lib site to have access to any paid-for material).
You should use your shiny new code names on these papers, and upload them to TurnItIn. If I've recommended that you use the BBCC (as feedback on an earlier assignment), now is the time to start!
In a nutshell, Google will now integrate information collected from all of its services so that it can create a comprehensive profile of each of its users.
Click here to find out who Google thinks YOU are. (Note: this works best from your personal computer, rather than a public terminal in an on-campus lab.) I suppose, with teaching, research and personal use, not to mention my teenage daughter's love affair with the Internet, my computer is just too confusing for the "inferred demographics" algorithm to get a bead on. Google tells me this:
Your categories and demographics
No interest or demographic categories are associated with your ads preferences so far. You can add or edit interests and demographics at any time.
Isn't that helpful of them to let me give them more info about myself?
As for the whole cell phone + GPS location tracking that we discussed in the 9:30 class, the reason no one was really clear on the legality of that maneuver is that it's still not really been decided one way or the other (yet). Probable cause, third party doctrine, blah blah blah -- it's up in the air, or at least in the legislative branch and the lower court system, for the time being.
From a Wired story about last week's Supreme Court case on GPS & privacy:
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that “the present case
does not require us to answer” whether police need a warrant to employ
GPS monitoring of targets “without an accompanying trespass.” He said
the court may have to “grapple” with that issue “in some future case
where a classic trespassory search is not involved.”
Note that the SCOTUS is only dealing with the GPS question from a law-enforcement standpoint; they don't address the question of private firms using this info for marketing research purposes at all.
