Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target - cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”Īs the marketers explained to Pole - and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop - new parents are a retailer’s holy grail.
“The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
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