Posts Tagged ‘moms-to-be’

Flashback: Remember when Target caused a stir by ID’ing moms-to-be?

June 15, 2016

Now, researchers are trolling your web searches to auto-detect diseases.

The Washington Post recently channeled a study done by Microsoft — published in the Journal of Oncology Practice …

The essence: Microsoft’s big data analysts ID’ed folks who were querying questions like “how to treat pancreatic cancer” — hypothesizing that they might have been diagnosed with the disease.

Then, the researchers backtracked thru the prior searches done by those folks and detected a pattern of precedent queries that revolved around symptoms, e.g. abdominal swelling.

Bottom line:  the researchers were able to use the inferred pattern of symptoms to early-predict a disease diagnosis for a statistically significant number people who queried symptoms.

That’s potentially big news in disease diagnosis, though doctors caution that for many diseases, the onset of patient-queried symptoms may be too late-stage for effective treatment.

 

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The Microsoft query- disease analysis reminded me of how Target created some Big Data buzz for analyzing purchase patterns to ID moms-to-be. 

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Flashback: Remember when Target caused a stir by aiming at moms-to-be?

June 11, 2013

The Feds’ phone & internet surveillance programs that were revealed last week have raised the public’s consciousness re: Big Data.

Remember when Target created some Big Data buzz for analyzing purchase patterns to ID moms-to-be?

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In a previous post, we excepted from a NY Times article How Companies Learn Your Secrets that

  1. Much of what people do is based on habits, not conscious reasoning.
  2. Consumers’ shopping habits and brand loyalties are often more habitual than thoughtful.
  3. But, there are certain “events” — e.g. new baby, new home, recent divorce — that seem to make consumers more open to switching stores and brands.
  4. Savvy marketers are learning to identify these critical events — before they happen — and try to get consumers to switch  their behavior.

Target is one of the retailers identifying customers who are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers” … and pouncing on them.

Who?  Moms-to-be.

How are they doing it?

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