Target Data Mining

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Data mining is continuingly growing in use throughout many different industries for a variety of business purposes. Some of these industries are financial and banking, healthcare, retail, etc. (Groth, 2000). One of the main uses of data mining is marketing a company’s products and or services to customers (Groth, 2000). Organizations and businesses are constantly vying for new and existing customers’ attention and business. In order to achieve this, marketing of products and or services are needed to advertise these to customers. One of the major ways that organizations and businesses acquire their information is through data mining. They create customer profiles from all of the information that they collect to create these profiles. These …show more content…

Target’s data mining is so advanced and precise that they have been able to predict when a woman is pregnant before they know they are pregnant (Hill, 2012). Target collects information about everything that their customers have purchased not only from their stores, but from other sources too (Hill, 2012). This information is then stored and linked to a “Guest ID number” which is linked “…to their credit card, name, or email address…” (Hill, 2012). Target compiled this information along with information from their data bases about women that have created baby registries in the past and found patterns in this data (Hill, 2012). They were then able to analyze their customers to see if their purchasing habits were similar to those of pregnant women, which they were (Hill, 2012). Therefore, they are able to send out coupons to women for products such as scent-free soap, supplements such as calcium, hand sanitizers, etc. (Hill, 2012). Target’s predictions are so accurate, that they are able to predict a pregnant woman’s due date within a small margin as a result of their data mining abilities (Hill, 2012). This allows them to send the pregnant woman specialized coupons for items that she might need during different stages of her pregnancy (Hill, …show more content…

Companies must first gather information about the demand for their products and services, which is achieved through the use of research and customer surveys, etc. Once a company knows what their customers want they then use that information to plan out how to fulfill that need and create the product(s) in demand. This leads to companies gathering information about things such as materials needed, manufacturers that are able to make the products, costs of production and distribution, and how to deliver this to their customers. Afterwards, decisions are made about who is going to manufacture their product and the cost that are associated with it, the company must then share information about the product they are looking to create with the manufacturer. This information might contain size, weight, style, color, and many other requirements necessary for the manufacturer to produce the correct product. The manufacturer must share their information about the production of the product, such as the timeline for completion and the current status of the manufacturing process with the company. The company then uses this information to coordinate with the shipping carrier that they selected to use to distribute their product. The information that the company shares with the shipping carrier is that of date(s)

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