You, Your Secrets & What Companies Learn About Them.

We think we know all about marketing, branding, advertising.

We say: "I buy just what I need or want, not what someone or something tells me to buy."

Would that it were so. As Ralph Nader says, "You get away from marketing when you are asleep."

Start here if you have not already seen POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlocks' documentary about branding, advertising, and product placement brought to you by the very folks who do the branding, advertising and product placement.

Or here.

Or here.

Then ask yourself what you buy and how come you buy it.

When you are done talking to yourself, visit a fascinating and in-depth article by Charles Duhigg reporting for the NYTimes, "How Companies Learn Your Secrets."  It's so rich for mining I  don't know where to turn first.

Number 1: we are habit-driven creatures.  The habit works like this: cue + response + reward.  For example, it's Saturday night (cue) and on Saturday night I have fish and chips (response) because it's fun and greasy (reward).  And so it goes until something pretty drastic breaks the habit.  Drastic like a move, a divorce, a marriage or the like.

Raise your hands: who here uses the same dish washing detergent their mom used?  See.

Number 2: companies collect information on customers.  No news here.  But apparently Target is ahead of the game turning demographic collection into a data driven, statistics-based enterprise that makes the most of "the intersection of data and human behavior." 

Number 3: all the demographic information companies collect is meaningless (as we have learned in other areas of practice)

..."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."

The article claims that Target has gone so far in its analysis as to know when a couple is pregnant so they can target (ahem!) the new parents and turn them into loyal customers for years. A Dark Art or admirable enterprise?  

Admittedly, the article will take almost as long to read as it takes to watch The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.  Yet, it sure is worth knowing a bit more about what they know about you so you can decide for yourself who or what is the