Skinner Marketing: We're the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward - Bill Davidow - T... - 0 views
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the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser's interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.
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In the 1930's, B. F. Skinner developed the concept of operant conditioning. He put pigeons and rats in Skinner boxes to study how he could modify their behavior using rewards and punishments.
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Skinner's techniques of operant conditioning and his notorious theory of behavior modification were denounced by his critics 70 years ago as fascist, manipulative vehicles that could be used for government control.
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They were right about control but wrong about the controllers. Our Internet handlers, not government, are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior today.
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we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.
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The beauty of the Internet is that by combining big data, behavioral targeting, wearable and mobile devices, and GPS, application developers can design more effective operant conditioning environments and keep us in virtual Skinner boxes as long as we have a smart phone in our pockets.
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Operant conditioning techniques will and are currently being used to program the behavior of susceptible Internet users -- young men who play MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for forty hours a week, women who commit hours to social networks, shoppers seeking the thrill of a deal, and poker players.
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As smart devices become integrated into our lives, retailers who will know where we are standing in stores and fast food restaurants and bars will find ways to provide us with cues to trigger behaviors.
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The real question is how many hundreds of millions of us will become susceptible to what I believe will prove to be history's most potent marketing techniques.