How companies learn your secrets

How companies learn your secrets

The story in the article, “the power of habits why we do what we do in life and business,”features Andrew Pole a masters degree holder in Statistics and Economics who works in Target, a retail store since 2002.His work at target was to use insights gained from numerous researches conducted on humans daily habits to increase the retail store revenues.
However, the author of the article narrates how Andrew Pole was hired by target and the techniques used by the marketers to target potential customers by use of analytic techniques to identify consumer’s behavior. On the other hand, the author develops an insight on how researchers are undertaking research on identifying the science behind the habit of formation in order to use it to analyze and understand how daily habits influence decision of people. The main obligation of the author of this article was to undertake research on interviewing experts about habit formation before he met Andrew Pole.
During his tenure as an employee at Targets, Andrew Pole was assigned the task of analyzing the routine habits of the shoppers which would help the company to utilize the opportunity of exploiting the shoppers habits. Moreover, Pole was assigned a simple task of finding the consumer’s habits that were finding those particular unique moments when shoppers would come in to purchase certain products. This was to help the company to apply the marketing strategy by advertising certain products that they predicted shoppers would be expected to buy at a particular time by sending them coupons.

From the knowledge he gained from the research conducted in 1980s by a team of researchers led by U.C.L.A professor Alan Anderson and the data from the baby show registry at Target, Andrew Pole build a pregnancy- prediction model that enabled Target predict the shopping habits of pregnant women and reward them when they purchased items at the store. The management was pleased with his work eventually increasing his paygrade.