So you wonder why some people get the target mailers filled with coupons and others do not? Why your neighbor may get the same mailer you get but have different coupons?!
Turns out that ....
Target statistician Andrew Pole — before Target freaked out and cut off all communications — did some careful studying of what the Target shoppers were buying.
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... and likely for other things as well!
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.
While all that sounds kinda freaky, its even more bizarre when a father approached a manager and was absolutely FUMING bc his daughter had gotten coupons for maternity clothes and cribs... he later learned that his daughter was, in fact, knocked up.
I dont have a Target card... and Pole no long does data analysis for Target, but I would LOVE it if they would send me coupons SPECIFICALLY for what I use! However I am disturbed that they might know that I like M&Ms and o.b. periodically.... and that racey book I bought a few years ago as an over-the-hill birthday gift was not some weird fetish I need coupons for.
You can read the full article HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment