Target Consumer Habits
It all started in 2002 when two colleagues from the marketing department of Target, America’s second-largest discount store retailer, approached Andrew Pole, a data and human interactions fanatic and statistician. Pole knew how to analyze and interpret any data that spurted out from his technological devices. The marketers asked him, “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?” (Duhigg). Marketers always wanted to own the shopping habits of new parents because they were retailers’ holy grail. Amongst Pole’s list of tasks, his most important one was to identify unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits are flexible and with the use of the right advertisement,
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For decades now, Target has been collecting data from its customers. Target assigns each customer a unique Guest ID number, which keeps tabs on what they buy. If they used a coupon, mailed in a refund, or called the customer service line, everything is recorded in association with the ID number. Also linked to the number is the customer’s age, ethnicity, address, family size, estimated family income, marital status, moving history, credit card company, and websites visited (Duhigg). But to solve the marketers’ question, Pole had to go beyond that. From his computer, Pole started by looking at Target’s baby shower registry. He looked at how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date (this information was disclosed to the public) (Lubin). After running many tests, he noticed a pattern. Women bought more unscented lotions, bulked up on vitamins like calcium and zinc, and bought soap ad cotton balls. When someone started buying large amounts of unscented soap and extra big bags of cotton balls, it signals that their due date is nearing. As Pole’s computer analyzed the data, he identified 25 products that when combined, gave him a “pregnancy prediction score” and more important, he could estimate her due date within a small window (Duhigg). This allowed Target to send timed coupons to specific stages of the buyer’s pregnancy. This was how Target knew you were pregnancy even though you did not tell
For decades now, Target has been collecting data from its customers. Target assigns each customer a unique Guest ID number, which keeps tabs on what they buy. If they used a coupon, mailed in a refund, or called the customer service line, everything is recorded in association with the ID number. Also linked to the number is the customer’s age, ethnicity, address, family size, estimated family income, marital status, moving history, credit card company, and websites visited (Duhigg). But to solve the marketers’ question, Pole had to go beyond that. From his computer, Pole started by looking at Target’s baby shower registry. He looked at how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date (this information was disclosed to the public) (Lubin). After running many tests, he noticed a pattern. Women bought more unscented lotions, bulked up on vitamins like calcium and zinc, and bought soap ad cotton balls. When someone started buying large amounts of unscented soap and extra big bags of cotton balls, it signals that their due date is nearing. As Pole’s computer analyzed the data, he identified 25 products that when combined, gave him a “pregnancy prediction score” and more important, he could estimate her due date within a small window (Duhigg). This allowed Target to send timed coupons to specific stages of the buyer’s pregnancy. This was how Target knew you were pregnancy even though you did not tell