Charles Duhigg in his 2012 book “The Power of Habit” tells the story of how Target Corporation, the parent company of Target Stores, learned a lesson in relationships the hard way.
I would venture to guess that most people are not aware of the fact that their spending habits and their purchases are tracked by major retail corporations in large databanks where company statisticians labor all day to provide their marketing departments with an accurate picture of what needs to be stocked on their stores shelves. Done in the name of efficiency and store profitability, the goal itself is innocent enough, if you look at it from a distance.
But in this particular instance, Target pushed the envelope a little too far and turned what might be considered a good thing into something of a negative. And here’s where you can learn a very important lesson from Target’s experience.
Andrew Pole was a statistician working for Target when his colleagues from the marketing department approached him and asked if he could determine from buying patterns which of Target’s customers were pregnant.
“Pregnant women and new parents,” Duhigg writes, “after all, are the holy grail of retail. There is almost no more profitable, product-hungry, price-insensitive group in existence. It’s not just diapers and wipes. People with infants are so tired that they’ll buy everything they need—juice and toilet paper, socks and magazines—wherever they purchase their bottles and formula. What’s more, if a new parent starts shopping at Target, they’ll keep coming back for years.
Figuring out who was pregnant, in other words, could make Target millions of dollars.”
So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote that conveys how eerily accurate their targeting is. An angry man showed up at a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
Target seems to know before it shows.
“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 embarrassed and apologetic. “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.”
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it spooked people and left them feeling highly unsettled that Target knew about their pregnancies in advance.
And therein lies the lesson.
With so much personal information available today on the Internet through apps like Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram, it’s hard for people to resist doing a little snooping when faced with a potential “blind date.” Think back on the movie, Groundhog Day, when Bill Murray uses an abundance of information gathered over previous encounters to sweep an unsuspecting Andie MacDowell off her feet. Had she known what the unscrupulous Bill Murray was up to, we imagine the outcome would have been a slap in the face rather than a romp in the bedroom. And so too, Target learned their lesson as well, deciding to mix in the maternity items with other less specific things like lawn mowers and pole lamps in all their future mailings. Too much and too specific a set of questions on a first date can leave the other person uneasy and feeling “stalked.” Better in our book, to listen more, ease into the personal questions, and let your date tell their story in their own words.
It can save the date.