Short story ID: marketer helps niche group hide from marketers

April 11, 2015 10:54 AM

Trying to identify a short story in which someone whose job is to identify emerging groups of people with specialized interests and target them as niche markets turns those skills to helping some group hide their purchases and whatnot to evade that kind of targeting. Maybe the group being helped contained some relatives of the marketer? I'm pretty sure I read it within the past 15 years, and it's possible it was in one of those annual collections of SF short stories (like Dozois's series).
posted by stebulus to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Your description makes me think of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, but that's a novel.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:20 AM on April 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I'm pretty sure I haven't read any Gibson novels. Also, the allergy element mentioned in the Wikipedia plot summary is not in the story I recall. The protagonist wasn't a branding consultant, but a data analyst/explorer type.
posted by stebulus at 12:49 PM on April 11, 2015

I thought Gibson too. You might try the search term Coolhunting, although my initial browse was unsuccessful.
posted by mearls at 7:32 AM on April 12, 2015