Marketing 0

REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Map the customer journey in your organization. What are
the most critical touchpoints based on your experience?
What improvements can marketing technology bring to the
most critical touchpoints? How do you plan to implement
them?

---

PART IV
New Tactics Leveraging
Marketing Tech

---

CHAPTER 8
Data-Driven Marketing: Building a
Data Ecosystem for Better Targeting
In 2012, an article by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times
Magazine about Target predicting the pregnancy of a teenager made
a headline. The father of the teen was angry to learn that his
daughter had been receiving promotional coupons for baby items
from the retailer. He thought that the mail was misdirected, and
Target was encouraging her to get pregnant. After a conversation
with her, he learned that she was indeed expecting.
A year before the event, Target had built an algorithm to predict the
likelihood that a woman shopper was pregnant according to the
items she bought. The retailer had assigned a unique ID to every
shopper and connected it to all demographic information and the
shopping history. Big data analytics had revealed a specific
consumption pattern for actual pregnant women, which could be
used to predict future purchases of shoppers that matched the
pattern. The company had even attempted to predict the due date
based on the timing of the shopping. All these efforts would be useful
to determine who would get which mailed coupons and when.
The story is an excellent example of companies leveraging data
ecosystems to make more informed decisions. Data-driven
marketing is the first step in implementing Marketing 5.0. By having
an analytics engine, brands can predict what their potential
customers are more likely to buy next based on past purchases. That
way, brands can send personalized offers and run custom campaigns.
Today's digital infrastructure makes it possible to do those things not
only to a handful of market segments but also to individual
customers one by one.
For more than 20 years, marketers have been dreaming of having
this capability to create truly personalized marketing. Don Peppers
and Martha Rogers are the early proponents of one-to-one
marketing, which is a highly coveted practice. The “segments of one”

---

is considered the ultimate segmentation method, and the digital
technologies implementation in marketing all boils down to enabling
it.