On the subject of targeted markeing – Target, the US pharmacy, set up a Hadoop cluster (Big Data for trend analysis) to allow them to spot trends in their customer's buying habits via their loyalty cards.
One thing they discovered was that when female customers started buying certain products, it usually led to them buying maternity items soon afterwards – i.e. they were pregnant, but did not necessarily know it yet.
Target then started sending out discount vouchers for maternity items to households where someone had suddenly started buying these products.
In one household that that received some of these vouchers, the Father in the family took issue with Target, as he was convinced that there was nobody in his household who was pregnant, especially not his daughter.
As it turns out, his wife was pregnant, but she had not told her husband yet.
What Target now do is that they still send out the maternity item vouchers, but they mask it by sending out a bunch of unrelated vouchers as well as a disguise.
Edited By Timothy Moores on 22/06/2016 13:54:01