Analytics, Marketing, Habits, Targeting All in One Place

How Companies Learn Your Secrets from the New York Times Magazineis a must-read for anyone who is interested in analytics, marketing, how to lose weight, how to save money, Big Brother, and more. It’s all here.

Target Your Audience

For those interested in losing weight, the author imparts a great lesson in habit. It basically is cue, routine, then reward. Cue … some stimulus or call to action. Routine … going something the same way over and over again that becomes habit. Reward … some happy thing that happens at the end. To understand the habit loop, as author Charles Duhigg called it, is deeply ingrained in our brain, because it is a way for our brain to conserve energy from having to think through everything.

So, take a look at your bad habits. Try to figure them out, and you can fix them. … Yup.

But the crux of the article deals with habits, how we all fall into them, analytics of the data trail we all leave, and how we are targeted. We need to learn how to communicate effectively with our constituents, using analytics.

But here’s the deal. We need to be honest about analytics and targeting. Constituents may not like it, but they will like it less when we use analytics and targeting as effectively as we can.