Every share, every click we make on the internet leaves a piece of data to the virtual world. And all this creates a virtual profile of who we are, what kind of human being we are, our tendencies and possible behavior. In this way, we want to know enough to give us enough information for those who want to know.
In 2012, an angry man entered one of the Target retail chain branches in Minneapolis, headed directly to the principal’s office. Nasıl How do you send such an e-mail to my daughter? He’s still a high school student! Arak shouted one of the marketing e-mails the supermarket sent to potential customers. The e-mail filled with pictures of smiling babies was introducing products such as baby cradles, newborn baby clothes and food and care supplies for them.
Ediy Are you encouraging children to get pregnant? Çıkış the angry father said. The manager who checked the e-mail saw that coupons and advertisements for pregnancy products were indeed sent to his adolescent daughter. He apologized for this grave mistake. A few days later, he called his man once more to apologize formally on behalf of the company. But this time the father’s voice was dominated by embarrassment, not anger.
I talked to my daughter, she said ’and added; ‘It seems that there have been things in my private life that I have never heard of. Turns out my daughter was really pregnant. I owe you an apology.’
Target retail chain sent a 15-year-old girl advertising her pregnancy products two weeks before she even told anyone, including her parents, that she was pregnant. How could that be possible? Thanks to the company’s proprietary algorithms for customer profiles.
When Andrew Pole started working at Target in 2002, the department’s main focus was on finding the right product for the target customer. For example, if you buy a bathing suit in April, send a sunscreen coupon in July or a diet catalog in December. But one day the company’s marketing authorities made a strange request to him: mü Is it possible for us to find out that a customer is pregnant, even when he wants no one to know about it yet? ’
Studies in the field of consumer psychology show that our preferences in the purchase of daily life materials are entirely based on habit. So it is very difficult for the marketer to change the shopping culture to the consumer in everyday products. Until there are important changes in their lives such as marriage, graduation, starting a new business, moving to a new home.
These moments are moments when the consumer becomes the ideal prey for brand marketers. Having children is the most radical change in a person’s life. Learning that you are pregnant is a knowledge that radically changes a person’s shopping routine and leads them to new brands. This time is very short, which means a race against time for those who sell these products. So the sooner Target learned this information, the more successful it would be to make a potential customer.
How will the needs be determined
How would Pole find out about this? Many shopping giants store their customers’ personal shopping history with a customer-specific code. Target is one of the most skilled companies in the world. Pole and his team reviewed the shopping histories of thousands of customers who stated they were pregnant. And he identified 25 products, each of which gave him a score.
For example, everyone was taking lotion. However, pregnant women were taking too much odorless lotion than usual, especially at the beginning of the fourth month of pregnancy. In the first weeks, many pregnant women were taking more magnesium, calcium, and vitamin supplements than normal, preferring larger bags. Using these statistics, the algorithm developed can accurately predict not only whether the customer is pregnant, but also in what week of pregnancy, and send coupons of the products they will need according to that period.
That’s how the young girl from Minneapolis made her pregnancy clear to the company even before her parents with the products she was looking at on Target’s website. E We can send you a coupon and catalog of a product you will need before you even know you will need it, Pol Pole told a journalist he was interviewing.
However, the algorithms do not stop here. Every share, every click we make on the internet leaves a piece of data to the virtual world. And all this creates a virtual profile of who we are, what kind of human being we are, our tendencies and possible behavior. We can imagine that we build our ’virtual staff de under our own control with what we share on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, even in our controlled sharing, we provide enough information for those who want to know us with everything.
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