ecomhack Meetup #2: Personalization in Commerce - Creepy or Cool?

By using technologies such as sensors and beacons, recording customer behavior and augmenting these data with public data from various social networks, merchants and brands can create highly personalized shopping experiences both in their online and in their physical retail stores.

In many cases, customers benefit from this approach because e.g. they are presented a curated choice of products or discover interesting articles they probably wouldn't have found otherwise.

At the same time, however, there are scenarios where too much individualization has the opposite effect and scares customers. If e.g. facial recognition is used and salespeople address customers by their names, most people will find this creepy and intrusive.

During our Meetup event, we'd like to enter a discussion about how far personalization in commerce can go and where the limits between creepy and cool are.