The Power of Algorithms and Big Data: A Marketing Perspective on Consumer Manipulation in Business

In marketing, predictive analytics molds big data into tools that can create demographics, target pleasurable neuromodulator chemicals like dopamine, and influence individual and societal behavior patterns. Professionals and scholars alike can use machine-based computation to transform big data into usable knowledge that accurately represents and tracks human behavior. The deception used by marketers to achieve monetary profit can be seen as a direct exploitation of consumers’ trust and privacy. In the past couple of decades this has led to the acceleration of the attention economy and has fueled the age of information. It has pushed countries to not only enforce new laws and regulations, but also race to secure control over data science technologies. Thus, this unchecked greed has created a world in which the power of algorithms and big data is of paramount importance. The future of humanity rides on the success of artificial intelligence algorithms (AI technologies), it is imperative that conversations around this topic become more frequent. The research for this thesis will ultimately lead to a better understanding of how the unregulated dynamic between artificial intelligence programs, big data, corporations, and marketers have had an invasive impact on consumers.