A Small Flaw in the Kroger Loyalty Algorithm: My Cats

Dear Kroger Marketing Team,

I have a completely unserious complaint about what is otherwise a very serious piece of marketing technology: I think your loyalty algorithm has fundamentally misunderstood my household.

Over the years, I’ve received personalized Kroger coupons based, presumably, on my purchase history. I’ve always appreciated the concept. As someone who works with numbers and thinks far too much about how businesses operate, I understand the bargain behind a loyalty card.

You give me a discount. I give you data.

Fair enough.

In fact, I’ve always been fascinated by the economics of it. If I save $7 on a $100 grocery trip, Kroger hasn’t simply given me $7. You’ve learned what I buy, what I don’t buy, which coupons I redeem, which ones I throw away, how much of a discount changes my behavior, and—perhaps most importantly—how much of a discount doesn’t change my behavior.

That’s valuable information.

Which brings me to my problem.

Somehow, despite all that sophisticated data analysis, Kroger has historically managed to send me coupons for things I didn’t know I wanted while rarely sending me coupons for the products my household consumes with almost industrial regularity:

Cat food and cat litter.

I have a lot of rescued cats.

I am attaching photographic evidence of the relevant consumer demographic.

As you can see, these are not animals who appear prepared to accept:

“Sorry, everyone. There wasn’t a digital coupon this week, so we’re suspending food service until the next promotional cycle.”

They are a demanding focus group.

This does, however, leave Kroger with an interesting marketing dilemma, and I suspect your algorithm already knows it.

My demand for cat food and litter is essentially inelastic.

You don’t need to give me a coupon.

The cats have already done your job.

If I need cat litter, I’m buying cat litter. If I need cat food, I’m buying cat food. There is no realistic price point at which I come home empty-handed and explain to this group that we’re waiting for a better promotion.

Meanwhile, when you sent me a coupon for something I didn’t ordinarily purchase, sometimes I bought it.

So perhaps your marketing system wasn’t failing at all.

Perhaps it understood me perfectly.

And frankly, I find that a little disturbing.

The coupons I appreciated most were actually the boring ones—for things like bags of frozen vegetables that I already used regularly. Those saved me money without convincing me to add something unnecessary to my cart.

From Kroger’s perspective, however, those may have been the least successful coupons. You paid me to do something I was already going to do.

Which means that after all these years, I may finally understand why nobody was desperately mailing me cat-litter coupons.

Still, I thought I would make one final appeal on behalf of the focus group pictured in the attachment.

If the Kroger marketing algorithm would like to prove that it has both a sense of humor and a heart, I am reasonably certain that its subjects would accept a cat-food or cat-litter coupon.

I would accept it too.

And, in the ultimate victory for Kroger’s data scientists, we all know perfectly well that I’m going to buy the stuff anyway.

Sincerely,

Ron Hall

P.S. If your customer analytics department has already classified my household as “statistically improbable feline consumption,” I would very much like to know.