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? ”
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. His
parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H,
Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math
nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like
going out and evangelizing analytics.”
As 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. Most shoppers don’t buy
everything they need at one store. 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. But Target sells everything from milk to
stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s
primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target.
But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad
campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly
difficult to change them.
There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s
life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One
of those moments —the moment,
really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and
overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs.
But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because
birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are
almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements
from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier,
before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the
marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their
second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts
of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us
a list?” the marketers asked.
“We
knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good
chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them
buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If
you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange
juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll
be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”
The
desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large
retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on
every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible,
Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID
number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a
coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help
line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it
and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also
linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you
are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes
you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved
recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you
visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you
read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought
(or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk
about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal
or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and
the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what
demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is
meaningless, however, 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.
Almost
every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S.
Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to
understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal
habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been
one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman
of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden
age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how
people think now.”
The
reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two
decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in
neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and
universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s
like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the
former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly
sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the
push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of
the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are
hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated
that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the
choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change
everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive
treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.
This
research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across
organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of
the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players
habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul
O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top
performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific
approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation.
The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to
figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.
Researchers have figured out how to stop people from
habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us
automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while
others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for
mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive
rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and
algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how
precisely they can sell.
Inside
the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology are
what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical
theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws.
Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons.
Inside those shrunken O.R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized
rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity
of their brains.
An
M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues
began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into
a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each
animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The
first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and
down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and
scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out
how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and
no indication it was working hard to find the treat.
The
probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal
wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat
sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head
exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and
again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and
began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their
brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the
maze more quickly, its mental activitydecreased. As
the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats
started thinking less and less.
This process, in which the brain converts a sequence
of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens,
if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple:
you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your
mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still
others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could
have emerged at all.
Take
backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act
required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves
peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting
your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot
from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while
keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate
into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the
gas pedal and brake.
Now,
you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without
thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own
devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit,
because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy
is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail
to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk
or a speeding car coming down the street. So we’ve devised a clever system to
determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a
chunk of behavior starts or ends — and it helps to explain why habits are so
difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.
To
understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking
rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to
navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain
activity — once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click
right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the
chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats’ brains were fully engaged, and the
dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From
behind the partition, the rat wasn’t sure what waited on the other side, until
it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard
that sound, it knew to use the “maze habit,” and its brain activity decreased.
Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook
itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular
habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much
deeper.
The
process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First,
there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and
which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental
or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if
this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop
— cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic.
The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving
emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can
be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that
some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like
the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal
(like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain
experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards,
in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them
at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic
behaviors.
Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed
or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit
emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you
deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old
pattern will unfold automatically.
“We’ve
done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit,
and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,”
Graybiel told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place and put
in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never
really disappear.”
Luckily,
simply understanding how
habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of
studies conducted a few years ago atColumbia
University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to
understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a
health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise.
Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit
formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and
rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.
The results were dramatic. Over the next four
months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent
twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded
similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start
running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like
always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running
clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the
sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log
book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward — craving
the treat or the feeling of accomplishment — and there will be a measurable
neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.
Our
relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes
or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the
neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking
on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can
build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail
sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not
important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing
of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered,
and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long
stretches without checking your in-box.
Some
of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate
America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science,
consider how one of the world’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used
habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers.
P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from
Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens
of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.’s executives began a
secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.&
G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that
could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car
interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product — Febreze — the
company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named
Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television
commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated
the product’s cues and rewards just right.
The first ad showed a woman complaining about the
smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket
smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate
the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The
reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying
about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. “Sophie will always smell
like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my furniture doesn’t have to.”
The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating
how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two
months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.
The
panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews
to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came
when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and
organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when
P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent
most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.
According
to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do
you do about the cat smell?”
“It’s
usually not a problem,” she said.
“No,”
she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”
A
similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze
wasn’t selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn’t detect most of
the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become
desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don’t
smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure.
That’s why Febreze was a failure. The product’s cue — the bad smells that were
supposed to trigger daily use — was hidden from the people who needed it the
most. And Febreze’s reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who
couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place.
P.&
G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze’s ad
campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and
watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze
to people’s daily habits. When that didn’t reveal anything, they went into the
field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a
woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four
children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn’t appear
to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of
everyone, she loved Febreze.
“I
use it every day,” she said.
“What
smells are you trying to get rid of?” a researcher asked.
“I
don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal
cleaning — a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”
The researchers followed her around as she tidied
the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet’s corners,
then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed,
picked up the children’s shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed
Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.
“It’s
nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when
I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would
empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.
When
they got back to P.& G.’s headquarters, the researchers watched their
videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene
after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video,
when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking
up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done
(reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to
straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her
hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to
create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was
piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to
position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the
reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.
The
company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More
perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely
neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television
commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using
Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was
designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room
(cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you’ve done a
great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze
(routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads
implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.
And
so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy
odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze
revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year
later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned
dozens of spinoffs — air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents — that now
account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began
mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can
actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the
world.
Andrew Pole was hired by Target to
use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales.
His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers
and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s
work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them
catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually
purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and
diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify
those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become
particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to
begin spending in new ways.
In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a
U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most
mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They
learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these
products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex
decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays
and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.
But
when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from
college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits
became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for
retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely
to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house,
they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce,
there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.
Consumers going through major life events often
don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers
notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote,
customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a
precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can
change someone’s shopping patterns for years.
And
among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that
moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in
their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn
millions.
The
only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds.
Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how
shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the
registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data,
and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of
people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby
registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning
of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20
weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and
zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly
starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in
addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting
close to their delivery date.
As
Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25
products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a
“pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due
date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very
specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a
hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23,
lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough
to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue
rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her
delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data
attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits.
They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her
to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she
frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they
reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks
coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.
In
the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only
cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons
the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for
grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products,
they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more
obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.
Pole
applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national
database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely
pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target
and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators
could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and
clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they
were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade.
Eventually his paygrade went up.
At
which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react
when they figure out how much Target knows?
“If
we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and
they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people
uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with
all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where
people get queasy.”
About
a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a
Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching
coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an
employee who participated in the conversation.
“My
daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and
you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to
encourage her to get pregnant?”
The
manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the
mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained
advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of
smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to
apologize again.
On
the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my
daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I
haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its
representatives declined to speak with me. “Our mission is to make Target the
preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value,
continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote in a
statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain
insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of
our guest population.” When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting,
the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate
information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not
intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to
identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in
compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to
protected health information.”
When
I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a
spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was
told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give
you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named
Alex.
Using
data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected
his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how
could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without
making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of
someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?
Before
I met Andrew Pole,
before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I
had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.
I
had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a
chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to
be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But
every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a
cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised
myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.
Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.
When
I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview
by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my
habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria,
bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.
Next
came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood
sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary
distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?
Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings,
but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first
place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk
instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I
bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I
wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving.
Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire
for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned
out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I
wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the
cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and
chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.
All
that was left was identifying the cue.
Deciphering
cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure
out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain
time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your
kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of
five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the
immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I
wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:
Where
are you? (Sitting at my desk.)
What
time is it? (3:36 p.m.)
What’s
your emotional state? (Bored.)
Who
else is around? (No one.)
What
action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)
The
next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I
always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.
Once
I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my
habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new
behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter
& Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather
than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every
day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to,
spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have
stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision,
any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now
a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie
ritual).
After
Andrew Pole built
his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female
shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of
those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it
obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow
things down.
The
marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample
of women from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to
see how they reacted.
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad
booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you
bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do
that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal
was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.
“With
the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the
executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew
pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad
for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to
infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by
chance.
“And
we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on,
she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got
the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it
works.”
In
other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and
rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks —
then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a
cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a
reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the
store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase
everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how
much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.
Soon
after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The
company doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 —
when Pole was hired — and 2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67
billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room
of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that
appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”
Pole
was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected
this would become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.
A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to
Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to
him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my
wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given
the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my
wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of
advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.
Pole didn’t answer
my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home
in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I
stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts
and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the
computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have
too many pacifiers.
When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on
diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was
shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight,
buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and
besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs.
It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s
prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide
its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last
time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want
before you even know you want them.”
