step by step by step

thosepeskydames:

Whenever I go shopping the checkout reliably spits out coupons and vouchers for sanitary products, hoisery and cat food. My supermarket knows I get my period, frequently ladder my tights and that I own two cats.

How? Because I have a Nectar Card to collect ‘points’ which I can redeem to save me money on my purchases and this enables them to keep a list of all the items I regularly buy.

Sometimes I find this borderline creepy, but Target (the chain store) manages to find the line and take a large step over it. They use the information on what you buy to work out if you are pregnant and when you are likely to give birth. Which then lets them send you all the appropriate baby related advertising.

And they do this well enough that they have, seemingly, managed to have discovered a high school girl was pregnant (and send her the appropriate coupons for maternity wear) before her own father knew. Although, thanks to Target, he found out pretty quickly…

Charles Duhigg, writing in the New York Times , talked to Andrew Pole, Target’s statistician, to find out how Target managed this.

Target assigns every customer a ‘Guest ID’ which is tied to their credit card, name or email address which enables Target to store a history of everything they’ve bought. And also all other data they have collected from them or bought about them from other sources.

Using that, Andrew Pole looked at historical buying data for all the women who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. Pole observed the shopping habits of these customers and how these habits changed as the baby’s due date approached. An analysis of this data provided some useful patterns - In the first trimester people stocked up on supplements such as calcium and zinc and in the second trimester they bought larger quantities of unscented lotions.

Many people buy supplements and unscented lotions but Target’s analysis provided twenty-five products that, when analysed together, provided each shopper with a ‘pregnancy prediction’ score. It even provided data which allowed the statisticians to estimate the due data to within a small window, letting Target time their coupons to specific stages of pregnancy.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by U.C.L.A. professor Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ household purchases - items like toilet paper, toothpaste and bin liners. They found these purchases were habitual and involved little decision making. Which meant it was hard for advertisers to exert their influence, even with the use of coupons. But Andreasen also found that major life events causes shoppers’ habits to become flexible in ways that could be predicted. This allowed the advertises to target (pun, lol) shoppers during these major life events in order to change their shopping habits to ones which were more profitable to the supermarkets.

Bringing that back to pregnancy, as Charles Duhigg succinctly puts it, ‘if companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions’.

While I find this intrusive, I suspect some parents-to-be will find coupons useful. But I will leave you with some points to ponder - chiefly ones I don’t feel I can speculate upon as I’m not part of Target’s audience or had the experience to qualify my speculations.

Not everyone is delighted to be pregnant and not everyone wants to have the fact continually pushed at them in the form of mail shots and money-off. In a similar vein not every pregnant person wants that fact advertised, or hinted at to people they don’t know.

Target does not always get this right and, as this has hit mainstream media, I worry Target’s advertising might be used as the lie-detector to confirm unfounded suspicions.

Target’s coupons included maternity wear and a vast range of things for ‘Mums-To-Be’. Which adds another gendered slap in the face for trans-men like Thomas Beatie

And, perhaps most importantly, some pregnancies end with a miscarriage, an abortion or a still-birth. I can only image that, for some people in this situation, this will be a painful reminder of the event and made worse by the unexpected arrival of baby catalogues and vouchers for nappies.

On that note I’d like to add, the national Mailing Preference Service (UK) have launched a new Baby Mailing Preference Service to enable parents who have suffered a miscarriage or bereavement of a baby in the first weeks of life to register their wish not to receive baby related mailings. If you would like to register your wish not to receive baby related mailings, visit the website www.mpsonline.org.uk and click on the Baby MPS option, or contact the MPS for an application form, telephone 020 7291 3310, email babymps@dma.org.uk