Data analysis predicts pregnancy based on what you buy

Sangeeta

Ah! if only you can predict something…, life will be much more easier and successful. If not anything, you can win the stock market gamble as it is based on people’s sentiments more than any underlying fundamentals. We are a new generation of people and information of any kind is just at our finger tips (literally). If we are not using it to full extent for our growth then only we are at loss. And all this is possible due the huge amount of Data generated everyday.

What is Data Analysis ?

I dont have to explain more on the topic as it is already covered in the above articles which you can check out immediately.

What Data can predict?

I came across an interesting fact that a girls pregnancy was known by a data analyst much before her parents knew about it. There is this shop in USA “Target ” which sells almost everything under one roof and are running successfully for many years now. To acquire a bigger market share they formed a team which will look into the information provided by its customer on daily basis. Information like name, age, sex, phone number mail id, credit card and bank details, paying and buying habits etc.

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

What they did is, they created a guest ID for each customer and this guest id is their credit card number and every-time they buy things, Targets’s software will register it, and the software can tell what were the things bought by the customer before. They have worked out a Data Analysis Model which runs a test on all the available data to see the buying pattern of its customers. What time of the day, months or year people buy and what kind of products do girls, married woman and pregnant woman buys. Based on this they noticed a pattern in the stuff a pregnant women buys, and made list of all the such products. So every time a girl buys any of these products the software gives some probability points to that guest ID and if the probability reaches more than 80% then they send out special discount coupons to that customer for baby products.

The same happened to a teenage girl and the father came fuming to the store and took the manager to the task as to why he has sent baby products related coupons to his teenage daughter to which the manager could do nothing but apologize and after few days the manager call the father again to apologize and gets a news that his daughter is indeed expecting baby. Full Story here .

What can you do?

Thats right, you are a startup and thinking of investing right now in a team for Data Analysis doesn’t make sense, but by just knowing what all is possible gives us an impense power to generate more creative ideas. What you can do is to start collecting and recording the data of all your customers and tractions which will help you in future, you can even buy data from many place, which will be the topic of future articles under this category.

Not only Businesses but customers are also having the power to use Data. They can choose the best services and go for the best rates provided, for example check http://isbn.net.in/ where if you put ISBN number of any book with the url gives the book rates in 5 different websites like flipcart, infibeam, crossword, homeshop and book adda and the customer will surely go for the best offer rate provided. So the power is given to all the people, who uses it best will be the winner.