Marketers zooming in on your daily routines - USATODAY.com: "Almost every move that Melissa Regan made on her home computer was watched by Microsoft. Ditto for her husband, Chris, and even their three youngsters.

For nearly two years, Microsoft research gurus visited the Regans' home in Germantown, Md., about every three months. They videotaped dozens of hours of the family working and playing at the computer.

What would prompt Regan, a part-time family therapist, to let Microsoft into her home to tape her family?

'As a consumer, I get really frustrated when products are designed poorly,' Regan says. She was OK with the intrusion 'because I knew exactly what information they were gathering and what they were doing with it.'

So the Regans gave up some privacy to get a free computer -- and feel a part of the development of Microsoft's Windows Vista software.

The Regans' experience shows how Microsoft and many of America's biggest companies have found what the YouTube generation already knows: Observing consumers unfiltered can be fascinating -- and profitable. To learn how people behave at home, companies are rounding up a few willing customers and tapping into technologies that are taking consumer market research to a far more personal level than questionnaires, mall interviews or focus groups.

For its Old Spice line, Procter & Gamble has videotaped men taking showers at home. Kimberly-Clark has placed special goggles or visors with tiny cameras on consumers to videotape how they bathe and diaper their kids.

Arm & Hammer has gone into homes to inspect the insides of refrigerators and the conditions of cat litter boxes. Nissan photographed the cluttered trunks and front seats of consumers' vehicles. And General Mills observes consumers shopping at a faux grocery store it operates in Minnesota.

More than ever, companies are pouring their resources into watching their customers.

Twenty years ago, Microsoft had two researchers who specialized in observing consumers at home or at work. Today, the company has 300.

At General Mills, about half the consumer research now involves observing people individually, compared with 10 years ago when about 80% of its research was done in focus groups.

Procter & Gamble has increased spending on such personal research fivefold since 2000. It spent $200 million in consumer-focused research last year.

'We're spending far more time living with consumers in their homes, shopping with them in stores and being part of their lives,' says A.G. Lafley, P&G's CEO. 'This leads to much richer insights.'

The marketing giants say the consumer-approved snooping is designed to knock the bugs out of new products before they hit the shelves. Or to tweak old products. Or to help identify the perfect label, design or ad campaign for a product. The subjects of the research are paid volunteers who often are eager to participate.

The videotaped results are seen by product designers, package designers and marketing executives.

P&G is widely regarded as a consumer research kingpin. Its research department, which in 1923 was among the first created at a consumer products company, now observes or works with more than 4 million consumers a year in 60 countries.

P&G has become an even more relentless consumer observer under Lafley.

'It helps us identify innovation opportunities that are often missed by traditional research,' he says.

Some wonder where all of this one-on-one research is leading.

'Companies will tell you one thing,' says George Ritzer, sociology professor at University of Maryland and author of The McDonaldizaton of Society.

But the real goal, Ritzer says, 'is to figure out what individuals are doing so (companies) can find a way to force more things -- more expensive things -- down their throats.'

One privacy specialist says that although participants volunteer for such research and may be compensated modestly, they often don't realize what they're getting into.

If the research takes place in the home, 'there may be disruptions in the family,' says Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal. 'And intimate things in the house that a researcher takes note of could be embarrassing,' even if they aren't revealed publicly."

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