How Companies Learn Your Secrets
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1) Companies are better understanding customer psychology, especially when it comes to making purchases. Both understanding habit formation and probing receptiveness to marketing messaging are included in this bucket.
2) Companies are better able to draw correlations between pieces of known data. It's always easy to say at a 30,000 ft level that when it rains, more umbrellas will be sold; now those correlations are at the individual customers level.
3) Companies are betting linking together the understanding of customer psychology and the correlations of various customer actions, to improve their marketing. They can look for actions that cue them into what behavior status a potential customer is currently experiencing, and market with a highly targeted message.
All three of these points are ones that web companies have been working on many many years. There are certainly many more insights to unlock there, but what's particularly at the fore-front of data mining is the application of these three points to brick & mortar retailers, where data has traditionally been harder to collect and understand.
n% of 20-something year old Billys facebook Saturday statuses mention 'pub', 'hangover' and 'pint' between 2000 and 2330. Therefore chances are that Billy will be in the pub every week in between those times.
x% of Billys family had photos of them being grey haired at 55, therefore Billy is likely to go grey at about the same time.
n% of Billys friends had taken photos of babies by age j after being in a relationship for k years. Billy has been in a heterosexual relationship for x years therefore is m% likely to have a child at a similar age.
It's a great exercise if you want to hack your own habits and learn about his methodology and research at the same time. Uses all the same ideas.