Target has got you in its aim Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers. Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant -- and loyal -- buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole -- before Target freaked out and cut off all communications -- about the clues to a customer's impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they've bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. From the NYT:
Or have a rather nasty infection...
And perhaps that it's a boy based on the color of that rug? So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote -- so good that it sounds made up -- that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
(Nice customer service, Target.)
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
Bold is mine. That's a quote for our times. Subscribe to Forbes's The Premise tech news digest today. So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o' coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the "Go the F*** to Sleep" book, they more subtly spread them about:
So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you've fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out. Duhigg suggests that Target's gangbusters revenue growth -- $44 billion in 2002, when Pole was hired, to $67 billion in 2010 -- is attributable to Pole's helping the retail giant corner the baby-on-board market, citing company president Gregg Steinhafel boasting to investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.” Target was none too happy about Duhigg's plans to write this story. They refused to let him go to Target headquarters. When he flew out anyway, he discovered he was on a list of prohibited visitors. I think most readers of the excellent piece will find it both unsettling and unsurprising. With all the talk these days about the data grab most companies are engaged in, Target's collection and analysis seem as expected as its customers' babies. But with their analysis moving into areas as sensitive as pregnancy, and so accurately, who knows how else they might start profiling Target shoppers? The store's bulls-eye logo may now send a little shiver of fear down the closely-watched spines of some, though I can promise you that Target is not the only store doing this. Those people chilled by stores' tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal -- and paying for far more of their purchases in cash. A must read: How Companies Learn Your Secrets [New York Times] drawn from Charles Duhigg's forthcoming book,
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