Article: How Visa Predicts Divorce (which the company denies doing at all), talks about correlations and uncanny similarities between groups of people based on their spending habits and preferences.
From the article:
Canadian Tire`s findings:
- Cardholders who purchased carbon-monoxide detectors, premium birdseed, and felt pads for the bottoms of their chair legs rarely missed a payment.
- Those who bought cheap motor oil and visited a Montreal pool bar called “Sharx” were a higher risk.
“If you show us what you buy, we can tell you who you are, maybe even better than you know yourself,” a former Canadian Tire exec said.
UPS predicts when customers are at risk of fleeing to one of its competitors, and then tries to prevent the loss with a telephone call from a salesperson.
With “Total Rewards” card, Harrah’s casinos track everything that players win and lose, in real time, and then analyze their demographic information to calculate their “pain point”—the maximum amount of money they’re likely to be willing to lose and still come back to the casino in the future.
Players who get too close to their pain point are likely to be offered a free dinner that gets them off the casino floor.
It really is not a coincidence that you got that call, or were offered some sort of freebie when you were about to call it quits.
GIVING HUNCH A SHOT
There is also a website out there that gives personal recommendations. It starts by Hunch getting to know you: what do you like; how do you think; who are you? Then, Hunch builds a taste profile mapping your unique tastes & preferences to the people, places and things all around you which you might like. The result is great recommendations that are customized just for you.
I answered a bunch of mundane questions about my actions, and ended up getting this:
I would say the Vacations are spot on, I avoid credit cards except for the ones I have and the dinner ideas are spot on as well, although I would have liked to have seen pho, shawarma and French dishes in there.
Hunch has revealed with their questions the following generalizations:
- people who enjoy dancing are more apt to want to buy a Mac
- people who like The Count on Sesame Street tend to support legalizing marijuana
- pug owners are often fans of The Shawshank Redemption
- users who prefer aisle seats on planes “spend more money on other people than themselves.”
