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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.Pole ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.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:“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize againOn the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Reasoning with a fundie is like playing chess with a pigeon; no matter how good I am at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it is victorious - Anonymous
Let us drink like dwarves; Smoke like wizards and party like hobbits!
I'll stop eating beef lamb and pork the same day they start letting me eat vegetarians.
Is this really all that different than what Amazon or any other online retailer does?
Yeah, gays cause hurricanes, tits cause earthquakes, and lack of prayer causes tornadoes. Learn to science, people.
Porn peddlers peddling pedal porn? My life is complete.
Life for the sake of life means nothing.
If I got coupons in the mail for maternity items, I wouldn't get upset over it. I'd just find someone who was preggers and who could use them. Don't most stores have to keep a registry of what they sell and to whom in case of criminal investigations, anyway? Sometimes tracing the purchase of an item used by a criminal can be what's needed to solve a case.
Quote from: Nightangel8212 on February 20, 2012, 08:12:06 pmIf I got coupons in the mail for maternity items, I wouldn't get upset over it. I'd just find someone who was preggers and who could use them. Don't most stores have to keep a registry of what they sell and to whom in case of criminal investigations, anyway? Sometimes tracing the purchase of an item used by a criminal can be what's needed to solve a case.To my knowledge they don't have to. Not every store does it, either. They do on the other hand have to hand over the registry if they have one to the police when shown the warrant. There have been a few cases that were solved because it was proven that that duct tape, gasoline, and lighter had been bought the day of the crime.
