Have you heard about E-Scores?
Today’s New York Times has an interesting piece about Secret Electronic Scores that chart consumers’ buying power.
“These digital scores, known broadly as consumer valuation or buying-power scores, measure our potential value as customers. What’s your e-score? You’ll probably never know. That’s because they are largely invisible to the public. But they are highly valuable to companies that want — or in some cases, don’t want — to have you as their customer. ”
Gordy Meyer, the founder and chief executive, and a Fingerhut alum, says his system needs less than a second to size up a consumer and to transmit his or her score to an eBureau client.
EScores might range from 0 to 99, with 99 indicating a consumer who is a likely return on investment and 0 indicating an unprofitable one.
The piece points out that we are becoming a Scored Society. Google ranks our search results by our location and search history. Facebook scores us based on our online activities. Klout scores us by how many followers we have on Twitter, among other things.
And now e-scores rank our potential value to companies.
This is really nothing new. We already have FICO scores, which measure our credit-worthiness. E-scores are just another way for companies to measure how viable we are as customers. Why shouldn’t they utilize the metrics available? To read the article in its entirety, click here.
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