Author: Charles Duhigg
Publisher: The New York Times
Publication Year: 2012
Summary: The following article describes how every time you interact with a company, they learn and record information about you, from demographic details to shopping habits and everything in between. They do this in order to more efficiently market towards individuals and create predictive models that strengthens their bottom line. This article specifically describes how the retail giant, Target, used their predictive analytics department to determine when potential customers were pregnant so that they could market to them before birth in an attempt to turn the consumer into a lifelong Target customer. This backfired when the father of a 12-year-old girl received pregnancy marketing content.