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Shopping in an Automated World Digitally

By Anon Anon posted Apr 08, 2015 01:28 PM

  

Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man (A Blog Series)
By Jerry Maldonado –VP of Automation, Customer Lifecycle Solutions

ThinkstockPhotos-500237613.jpgNot so long ago we chatted about how much the world of shopping has changed.  Specifically how the Christmas holiday rush is no longer about the near collisions in the mall parking lot but more so about the near collisions in our driveway as family members rush to sign for packages. We only have eCommerce to thank for this.  Let’s revisit this topic but from an intensely data driven angle. Call me mad, but I am the automated mad man and online shopping is also about automated analytics. Did you know that in today’s world that while many shoppers go about browsing their favorite sites naively, they are actually being interviewed and their data is being collected at a tremendous rate?  In fact, every time you go log online, someone somewhere is polling to see what you are doing, where you are going and what you are interested in.  Don’t believe me? Ever wonder why that one particular match.com ad has been following you on Facebook for the past month? It’s not because they’ve invested all their marketing dollars on this one advertisement.  Have you been on that site lately? Perhaps googled it or just signed up? It’s not a coincidence that you get targeted advertisements for companies and products that you may have searched for once in the  last couple of weeks.  It doesn’t have to be just on Facebook either, ran a speed test on your browser lately? Ever notice that the links and the ads on that page were for items or that you purchased a day or two ago?


Still believe in coincidences? Let’s look somewhere else, for example the recommend list at your favorite online retailer?  Or the targeted emails you get from that retailer based on items you have purchased before.  Scary thing is that online retailers aren’t the only ones automatically capturing your buying habits. Does anyone have  a card from a supermarket that gets you discounts every time you use it , or one of them key fob cards with your store member id , or how about a My Lowes Card? Each of the methods above collect and store data about your transactions such as when you purchased your products, how you purchased it (online vs. in-store), and automatically sends that data to an analytical engine that can process the data. Based on this data, the company sends you targeted coupons every six weeks for razor blades and the store ads will incorporate several things on the front page that you cyclical purchase with recommended products in other eye catching placements.


I recently read an article on Target and their analytical engine.  This engine would analyze purchase data from women within child bearing ages and based on these patterns postulate that a particular woman was pregnant.  It would then base again on nothing more than that purchase data information where in the pregnancy she was and automatically send coupons for necessary items at different points of the pregnancy.  In fact the engine was so good it could predict to within a couple of days when the baby was due.I know I know; no way Mr. Mad Man. No way is an analytic model that good.  Yeah I thought that too until I continued reading the article and read a section about how the  father walked into target and demanded to speak with the manager.  When the manager arrived, the father asked the manager why target was sending out coupons on all this baby stuff addressed to his high school daughter.  Was Target trying to advocate for early pregnancy?  Were they encouraging underage ***?  The manager looked over the material, saw it was indeed from target, and informed the father that he would look into this and get back in a couple of days .  Irate the father left.  As promised, the manager called the father a few days later to discuss the coupons further but he was preempted by a very apologetic father who had recently found out that things were not as he had hoped and that,  in fact,  his daughter was with child and she had been researching about pregnancy online.


In the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise, shoppers are retinal scanned walking into a building and instantaneously the ad changes with targeted marketing.  While Minority Report is supposedly based in the future, this type of targeting marketing is very much a reality today.  Automated target marketing is done all the time, from demographic data analyst to historical job and wealth forecast to spending patterns and buying habits.  Mash this data together in an automated gonkulator of number crunches and you get the right audience to sell your wares.


So don’t be too surprised if in the near future, you walk into your favorite store and your phone buzzes alerting you of a sale in the next aisle.  There’s already an app for that called iBeacon that’s being leveraged by Walgreens and Walmart.  But being that I am the Mad Man and taking this technology a step further will mean that as soon as you walk into the store, that  90inch LED TV you saw online and the new sneakers you wanted in your size and color sitting in aisle five will be waiting for you at home with just the press of an in-store button.  Confirmed. What a way to shop.

 

Follow the Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man every Wednesday. Did you miss last Week’s post? Read it here: Is big brother watching a good thing or bad thing?

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