In March last year we published a post entitled "Data Breaches, Micro-Targeting Activities & The Fashion Connection: If You Can Swing Political Elections, Can You Also Influence Consumers' Behaviour?" The answer to that question arrived at the end of last year when it was announced that whistleblower and former research director at Cambridge Analytica Christopher Wylie had started working at Hennes & Mauritz AB as consultant and research director.
Last year Wylie was invited to speak at the annual Business of Fashion Voices event in Oxfordshire, where he discussed how companies such as H&M can use data and AI to reduce waste.
Wylie revealed in March 2018 that Cambridge Analytica analysed the personal data of millions of users harvested from Facebook; the company then prooceeded to determine certain personality traits linked to voting behaviour, created political and psychological profiles and manufactured targeted ads, influencing users' behaviour with extensive micro-targeting activities. The tailor-made adverts also influenced the US presidential election in 2016.
There was actually a strong fashion component in Wylie's job and research: the Canadian studied for a PhD in Fashion Trend Forecasting, then joined SCL Elections (parent company of Cambridge Analytica) and, in an interview with The Observer in March 2018, he highlighted the connection between fashion and politics when he stated "Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking 'Ugh. Totally ugly' to the moment when everyone is wearing them?"
So Wylie applied a system valid for fashion to politics and then redeveloped for politics a system that could have been applied to fashion to influence consumers. That's why last March we wondered if there are actually data harvesting companies out there servicing not political but trendy clients such as fashion groups or fashion houses interested in buying data and manipulate them to increase their customer base.
Could H&M be among them? The Swedish giant claimed Wylie is working with Arti Zeighami, the retailer's head of AI and advanced analytics, and that his role focuses on improving the group's use of data regarding consumer, product and market analysis capabilities to predict future sales and minimise such costs, while he's also working on "sustainable and ethical AI."
Wylie's job includes analysing data from the 30 million members of H&M Club to understand how their demands are catered. According to the fast-fashion retailer, the main aim of this process is optimising its production and reducing waste, a thorny issue for H&M, accused in November 2017 of burning new and unworn clothes. Indeed, while the company has been advertising its sustainable fashion initiatives such as the Conscious Exclusive collection, promoting the use of recycled materials, things haven't been going too well for the fashion retailer: H&M reported its sixth consecutive quarter of falling profits and the level of unsold garments also increased reaching $4bn in total.
The question at this point is will the data collected be used to really reduce waste or will it be employed to develop new forms of psychographic microtargeting and exploit consumers making them more likely to buy low quality trendy fast fashion items? (after all it sounds bizarre that a company who wants to be ethical is hiring somebody who devised and helped implementing a system that could be considered as highly unethical...). Because so far Wylie has always been emphasising the possibility of creating perfect matches between products and people, and therefore optimising sales (but, while algorithms can help you analysing million of data in a short time, you can gather precious info to optimise sales by actually talking to consumers - you don't need data for example to reveal that H&M has got a major problem in some places such as Italy where its sizes have been puzzling consumers since the Swedish giant established itself in the country 16 years ago and where it opened so many shops in a relatively short time that they have been competing against each other...). The dilemma remains together with another question: are there more fashion companies and groups interested in our data or already using them to brainwash us (well, that would explain why certain designers and brands are incredibly popular...).
Undoubtedly there are intriguing things you can do with data, but there's probably something data and algorithms can't do and that's reducing the greed of fast fashion giants, and offering better working conditions and better wages to people making cheap clothes in sweatshops. Guess that's something data and AI can't do, but human beings at the top of the power pyramid should do, maybe thinking less about money, data and consumers and more about the people used as cogs in their machines.
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