A few months ago, Percy told me a story about how Target identifies pregnant women by their shopping habits in order to market to them. I found this tidbit fascinating, but when today I followed a rabbit trail from the Dominicans to a story on the science of this marketing tactic, I found it was even better.
Apparently people’s shopping habits are fairly engrained, but at certain moments of transition, they become more flexible. So Target wants to grab people at one of those big transitions -- childbirth -- in order to become a larger part of their shopping habits. They find they had to fine-tune their targeted ads, however, as this hilarious story illustrates:
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“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 mailer] 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 again.
On 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.”The article also discusses more generally how habits are formed and how this is used in marketing in a variety of ways, giving examples from cafeteria cookies at work to the difficulties of marketing Febreze. A fun fact: if you get married, you are likely to buy a new type of coffee. If you get divorced? New beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment