The success of CRM applications and targeted marketing over the years has shifted the focus from mass marketing to personalized profiling of customers. The reliability of market research data is always a concern for the marketers. Biometrics systems are designed to accurately identify an individual including- fingerprinting, facial recognition, retina blood vessel patterns, DNA sequences, voice and body movement recognition, and handwriting and signature recognition.
Biometric marketing is important to business managers and marketers as is will lower the cost of market research and will give a competitive advantage to the initial movers. Considering the growing demand for personalized marketing, as mentioned according to eMarketer, $1.5 billion would be spent in 2007 for behaviorally targeted advertisements and is expected to grow to more than $2 billion in 2008. The movement toward personalized advertisements gives marketers a new view of their audience rather than traditional marketing demographics. Efficient implementation would help in demographic and behavioral segmentation.
With the growing concern of online theft and security leaks, Biometric systems could be just the concept to fill the uncertainty knowledge gap. Online companies have been for long trying to narrow this uncertainty gap for online consumers by applying several tracking methods during web site visits, including the use of smart cards, tokens, credit cards and digital certificates, to provide the means to correlate a consumer with an online system. But all suffer from uncertainties and lack of reliability in achieving accurate identification. For example, because a biometric sensor will never capture the exact same data twice, the matching of biometric features requires additional fuzzy logic comparison. This requirement will help in acquiring accurate data on market research. The companies with the help of this data will be in a better position to align its IT and