[username223]

I always feel strange seeing these walls of pseudo-scientific marketroid babble. Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate, or vice versa, but they've fallen so far down the rabbit-hole of this mundane task that they can come up with competing "models" and multi-thousand-word articles promoting and explaining them.

From an ordinary human's perspective, it's like shopping for groceries and getting side-tracked into a discussion of the natures of free will and the fundamental building blocks of matter. I just want to buy some decent-tasting apples, not grasp the neural correlates of my apparent "choice," or the string-theoretic basis of their multicolored skins.

That's not to say there aren't useful nuggets to be gleaned. For example, the fact that "third-party consumer data" and "customer matching" are the highest form of marketing surveillance tells me they're buying data from credit card companies and shady "data brokers," and correlating that using whatever identifiers they can. So I should probably keep entering fake phone numbers, zip codes, and email addresses when I can.

[Nextgrid]

> Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate

Their fundamental purpose is to convince their boss or client that they are indeed making consumers choose one over the other and make up data and/or theories to support that assertion so they can justify their fees/salaries/bonuses. They don't particularly care whether consumers are actually choosing the product.