Target Predicted Pregnancy

When you go through a significant change in your life, such as marriage or pregnancy, there is likely to be a significant change in your shopping habits. For example, if someone was pregnant, their shopping habits would differ. They would start buying items such as cribs, pacifiers, baby clothes, diapers, etc. So, shops, such as Target, could analyse this information, your shopping habits, and offer you coupons for specific items that you may be looking for at specific times.

Target assigns each shopper a unique ID. So, whenever you buy an item, visit their website, fill out their forms/surveys, they would add this information onto your ID, and this would be used to assign you a ‘pregnancy prediction’ or a ‘marriage prediction’, etc. Then, if they predicted that you were likely to be pregnant, they would send you coupons of items that the average pregnant person would purchase. This is also why Target hired statisticians to see through the data to recognize any indicators of someone going through a major life event, such as pregnancy. The statisticians could predict pregnancy to an accuracy of 80%.

In fact, Target even predicted that a high school girl was pregnant before her father even knew. The girl had purchased many items, and using this data, the statisticians computers could go through the data and predict that she was pregnant. So, Target sent coupons to the girl of products relating to maternity. Her father had seen this and got furious, so he went over to target and demanded to talk to the manager. He had thought that Target was encouraging his daughter to get pregnant, but after a while, he realized that his daughter was in fact already pregnant. So, Target knew she was pregnant before the father got to know, which is the power of statistics and data analytics.