Informative Speech on Current Marketing or Presentation

Informative on Current Marketing - Speech or Presentation Example Researchers have found that shopping habits are ingrained in consumers and they are often characterized by collecting certain items from one store and other items from a different store, that is, consumers will go to a toy store to get toys and go to a supermarket to get basic household commodities. Retailers must therefore place themselves in a position that allows them to take advantage of this complex environment (Krafft and Mantrala 7). Having been in existence for over a century, the Target Corporation an American retailing company has proved to be up to the challenge and has subsequently thrived in the retail industry. Through one of its employees, Target was able to create a model that allows the store to predict human behavior and thus preempt their competitors by meeting the individual needs of their customers. The challenge the store was facing was convincing their customers that they could shop for all they need at their store as opposed to getting specific items only wher e mostly it has been toiletries, cleaning supplies and socks. The biggest constraint was that consumers’ having their shopping habits ingrained which makes it difficult to convince them to adopt new ones. This restraint was presented by the marketers to one of the employees at the store that is a statistician. They explained that in every person’s life time there was a point at which their loyalties could be shifted. One such point is when expecting a baby where expectant mothers will look to brands offering them the best deals and in the past companies had caught up on this and resulted to sending them coupons. This was because companies can access birth records as they are made public. The challenge was now to preempt these companies by identifying a way to reach the expectant mothers while still in their early stages of pregnancy (Duhigg). The company already had a medium for collecting information but what they needed now was a way of predicting behavior. These two would then be integrated to allow the store capture customers as the data collected would be analyzed and be used to establish patterns that dictate shopping habits. This trend has been identified as predictive analytics and has been supported by a study that showed our thinking on issues such as dieting are influenced by habits rather than conscious decision-making which has allowed doctors to conjure up treatments for addictions, depression among other illnesses. Target tasked Andrew Pole the statistician employee with identifying when their customers’ shopping habits are particularly flexible so as to design suitable advertisements or coupons, which would lead the customers to have new, large spending habits. In essence, the store was striving to push psychological buttons after establishing a cue-routine-reward loop using a calculator designed by Pole. However, the issue of privacy came up as customers were bound to become worried about how Target was finding out such in formation. The company then decided to camouflage their intentions by sending ads for items that expectant mothers would need alongside other unrelated items so as to eliminate the fear of intrusion on privacy. Their most impressive story was where the company was able to determine a girl was pregnant even before her own father knew, leading them to send her coupons for expectant mothers (Duhigg). Predictive analytics raises the concept of shopper marketing as opposed to