I DON"T WANT another DAMNED card in order to "save money" at your store!

[Dewey_Finn]

Actually, yes. The idea is to change the customer’s buying habits and get her to buy more stuff from Target.

@Dewey_Finn

The New York Times Magazine has a really interesting article this week on people’s buying habits and how retailers attempt to influence this. The article describes how most people habitually buy certain products at the same stores (e.g., milk and bread from regular visits to the supermarket, paper towels from a less frequent visit to Target or Walmart). Target of course wants people to buy more stuff at their stores, but these habits are hard to overcome. But they realize that when a woman is having a baby, her habits tend to change. But marketing to a new mother is too late, as she is bombarded by many companies, so they set about trying to determine which of their customers are early in their pregnancies. Surprisingly, they can tell with a good deal of certainty that a woman is pregnant based on innocuous sounding things she is purchasing (vitamin supplements, unscented soap and lotion, etc.). The article includes this story:

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 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 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.”

Scary, but kind of awesome. And BTW, the article and the book on which it’s based goes more into detail on how one can influence one’s own habits.