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When he flew out anyway, he discovered he was on a list of prohibited visitors. They refused to let him go to Target headquarters. Target was none too happy about Duhigg's plans to write this story. 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.ĭuhigg 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.” As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. “And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random.

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 Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. Subscribe to Forbes's The Premise tech news digest today. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”īold is mine. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. “If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. 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. One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. 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.

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.Īs 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. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. 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. ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. 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. 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.

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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.Ĭharles 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. 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. Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers.

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