Does Target Have YOU in It's Aim??

As the years progress and technology advances, people are generating more and more data through their everyday actions of surfing the web, socializing on Facebook and Twitter, and shopping online and on-site at their favorite clothing stores and/or supermarkets.  The data that's created is collected, stored, and analyzed to find relationships to help businesses essentially make better business decisions.  This is the gist of data mining.  

One decision in which businesses use data mining techniques is the decision of which products should be marketed/advertised to a certain demographic of customer.  A good example would be Target's method of marketing baby products to their customers.  Target, along with almost every other business today, records EVERY piece of data that customers generate; everything from the type of product purchased to how the product was purchased (be it with debit, credit, cash, check, online, on-site, during the day, at night,... the list goes on and on).  Once all of this raw data is analyzed, Target is able to make pretty accurate predictions of what customers want and need, create very informative profiles for each of the customers, and very effectively market certain products to customers, tailoring those products to very specific times in the customers' lives.  Target practices this marketing technique to increase customer loyalty by creating an image that Target has "everything for every occasion."

Pretty good way to use data, right?  Yeah, that's what I thought as well.  

As good of a way to use data as it may seem, there is a lot of controversy surrounding Target's marketing practices.  There are claims that Target is being too intrusive into the personal lives of customers and are invading their privacy! 

Forbes released an article that supports these claims with the title of "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did."  The article simply summarized Target's marketing technique of analyzing their customers' buying habits to make predictive profiles of their customers for more effective marketing.  The article also explains how Target accurately profiled one of their customers, a teenage girl, as pregnant based on her buying habits in comparison to other customer's buying habits. 

Some feel that her privacy was invaded due to the fact that the teenage girl never disclosed her pregnancy to anyone affiliated with Target, yet still got targeted promotional advertisements for baby and pregnancy products mailed to her home.

I personally feel that the girl's privacy was not invaded, due to the fact that although she may not have come right out and said that she was pregnant, clearly her buying patterns did!  After all, why would her receiving coupons for baby products be a bad thing if indeed she is pregnant?  I mean, isn't that what marketing is all about, finding out what the customer needs/wants and giving it to them?  I definitely think that Target is just ahead of the curve with putting all of their raw data to good use.

What do you think?