Chapter 9
Innovative or Icky?
“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
– Margaret Heffernan
How much do businesses know about us? When it comes to a company like Target, the answer is: quite a lot.1 For many of its customers, the giant retailer knows their age, whether they’re married, if they have children, where they live, their estimated salary, whether they’ve moved recently, what websites they may have visited, and so on. The company can also buy data to learn even more about its customers, including their ethnicity, their job history, the magazines they read, their political leanings, what they talk about online, and more.
All this information coupled with sophisticated analytics can be a powerful tool, enabling Target to determine, for example, when some of its customers might be pregnant. The company might then mail those women various coupons for maternity clothes, cribs, strollers...