Customized Marketing Strategies of Target - Case Study Example

Based on the product list, Target is coming up with customized marketing strategies for each of its customers. By exhaustive rendering of customers’ conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms, Target has revolutionized what it knows about its customers, therefore, how precisely it can sell. (Duhigg, 2012). Thus, it is clear that by collecting purchasing data, Target studies consumers’ purchasing behavior and thereby is coming up with effective marketing strategies to entice customers optimally.

            One of the key insights that emerged was consumers would be ready to experience bad things, if they knew they can buy a product that can solve or lessen that bad experience. This insight could be understood as a result of the ethnographic research done by the market research company Housecalls for the over-the-counter antacid Maalox. When makers of Maalox wanted to know how people with chronic heartburn became loyal to its product, the Housecall after doing an in-depth study came to the conclusion that its target customers “love their food more than they hate their heartburn.” (Osborne, 2002). The other key insight that emerged was the target customers of companies, which offer retirement plans, which could focus on how those plans could positively impact their lifestyle, more than the money they may get in their post-retirement phase. Using this insight that came out of ethnographic research, the company Wells Fargo designed its retirement planning site to include the various life stages used in the “ethnographic research to convey the message we meet you where you are” and provide relevant guidance instead of “producing numbers-dense material filled with endless financial projections.” (Cayla, Beers & Arnould, 2014).