“Who are you?” sang The Who. It’s an age-old question. Identity today is at the forefront of conversations in  both positive and negative ways. Identity is used to draw together communities with common interests and  values. It’s a complex and culturally dependent philosophical construct. Identity is also being used to group us in  ways that are productive and less so. Our political identity is a quick heuristic for deciding if someone is like us  or not. It’s like wearing a Cubs hat: You’ll make friends wherever you go and probably only enemies in St. Louis.

The flipside of identity is anonymity, which has increasing value and scarcity in today’s data-driven digital  world where we can be uniquely identified by our face, our fingerprints, our heartbeat, our breath and our gait. 

As we move into more 3D virtual spaces, how will we craft and express our avatar identities, and how many  will we craft? 

Underlying all this discussion is, of course, a central question for us all to consider: How do we as marketers  and researchers use what we know of identity and to what extent? Ponder on, dear reader. And ask yourself 

the question as you go: Who are you?