seems to me that dude who figured that out must have gotten a huge bonus considering the bump in sales Target saw.

In a broad sense, that's a lot more deep data mining than you could do with a web analytics package.

Sadly, most of what we do amounts to "What should I do to get more people to like us on facebook?"

if you could please give me the answer to that question, it would be very useful for my new job.

answers: incentives.

Free stuff.

well, yeah.

incentives doesn't always mean free stuff. it's all about what individual gains. it can be other monitary and non-monitary stuff

somebody would point that out to my boss...