As we went to press with this issue, The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story that Orbitz Worldwide, the online travel company, discovered that people who browse its site using Mac computers spend as much as 30 percent more a night on hotels than people who search the site using PCs.
Not one to miss an up-sell opportunity, Orbitz started showing Mac users different and often costlier travel options than those shown to people who surf the site using PCs.
Our cover feature is all about the emerging trend of businesses collecting reams of data on customers and prospects to improve target marketing and predict buying patterns. It’s a practice that has been around for years, but has recently become an even more intense focus of competitive companies, mostly on the consumer side.
In February, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a cover feature on Target’s intense — and somewhat secretive — effort to analyze customers’ buying habits in order to predict which customers were pregnant so as to target them with coupons before other retailers did likewise. Reporter Charles Duhigg told the amazing story of an upset father who stormed into his local Target to berate the store manager for sending his teen-age daughter coupons for baby products. The young woman’s buying habits fit the formula that Target had created to identify pregnant customers.
“She’s still in high school and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” the apoplectic father asked. The manager could only apologize.
When the manager called a few days later to apologize again, the father turned the tables on him. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in
my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
There’s a lot of talk in B2B sales circles these days about the need to know more about customers than they know about themselves. The idea is to show them efficiencies or upgrades
you can provide that they didn’t even realize they needed.
It’s working on the consumer side. Those we spoke with said it’s being adopted on the B2B side, but at a slower pace, partly because it’s a much more complicated sale. It’s a trend we’ll definitely keep an eye on. For now, check out what we found out about why you need a math geek on your team.
