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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

So, the first thing that came to mind was Target's datawarehouse market research work that got a lot of press a month ago. Some vocal people were up in arms about privacy, instrusiveness, money, etc., but this here move by Walmart should really put those peoples' minds at ease.

Here is a company with more money than god, yet they have to buy a company in order to spy on their (potential) customers with any degree of ROI and/or effectiveness, and only WRT date-based information. If you don't agree that they're spying, I think you can at least allow that this is (what could be known as) a sledgehammer approach to market-research.

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If you have the money, you might as well buy a company that already has product and data. Time is money. As far as only date-based info, this is data that they can't automatically get from within their system (aka matching purchases with specific credit cards).

Sure, but datawarehouse techniques have only just now reached a point in their evolution where they are able to react to pregnancy-related changes in buying behavior, which is still probably going to return false positives. I can't think of anything more significant in a human's life in affecting buying habits than pregnancy, yet that's the cutting edge.

Getting data is easy, it's doing something profitable with it that remains hard.

It's the same as any recommendation engine: Because you've bought x, based on similar patterns from other customers you're probably likely to buy y. The fact that it's pregnancy-related makes for a good (and slightly controversial) news article.

Throwing in the additional information that exists outside their system can lead to even better and timely recommendations.

My point is that deep-dive market research, let alone recommendation engines, really aren't very good (yet). Recommendation engines themselves, as a shallow version of what I'm talking about, haven't really progressed at all in the 10 or so years since Amazon et al figured out how to display the top three things that other people bought along the thing you're looking at, which isn't rocket science.

That's specious reasoning. All Walmart had to do was decide that the data was worth buying. This is no indication that the analysis they are already doing is ineffective, only that they think their analysis would be more effective with this data.

Of course, but my point is that currently the utility value of any data is pretty low.

I think one over-estimates the degree to which a company with pots of money can bring that wealth to effectively bear against acquiring marketing data like this (customer dates etc).

This possibly makes obtaining that data faster and simpler and hence the acquisition.

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