As a marketer, I find this article on predictive target marketing extremely interesting. Identifying the best customers. Understanding why they buy and when. Finding others like them, before they are prime customers.
There’s nothing new about profiling your best customers, looking for others like them and making them an offer.
It gets dicey however when the company knows more than the consumer’s best friends. Or parents.
As a consumer, I’ve heard people say “It’s scary how much they know.”
But as analytical and strategic as Target is at predicting who is pregnant and when they’ll want certain products, I don’t think that Target is ahead of the curve.
If you disagree, how much do you think that Facebook or Google could predict about a person or a household? For many, many consumers, they have much more information that just some buying behavior!
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the ads that are served to you in those browers. Better yet, take a look at creating an ad and all the choices you’ll have of narrowing down your target advertising audience!
Using Google AdWords and Facebook ads, you can target key phrases that people look for or what they say on their friend’s walls. And in Google Gmail, the content of the emails is studied so that the correct ads can be served to the right target market.
It makes the predictive buying behavior of the Target studies seem much less like spying.
What do you think - as a marketer? and as a consumer?
