This article boils down to three main points:

1) Companies are better understanding customer psychology, especially when it comes to making purchases. Both understanding habit formation and probing receptiveness to marketing messaging are included in this bucket.

2) Companies are better able to draw correlations between pieces of known data. It's always easy to say at a 30,000 ft level that when it rains, more umbrellas will be sold; now those correlations are at the individual customers level.

3) Companies are betting linking together the understanding of customer psychology and the correlations of various customer actions, to improve their marketing. They can look for actions that cue them into what behavior status a potential customer is currently experiencing, and market with a highly targeted message.

All three of these points are ones that web companies have been working on many many years. There are certainly many more insights to unlock there, but what's particularly at the fore-front of data mining is the application of these three points to brick & mortar retailers, where data has traditionally been harder to collect and understand.

A really interesting article. Really wonder how and what companies like Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, have learned through data mining.

I really liked the discussion of the habit loop. I've never seen it explained that neatly before.

Fascinating article, behavioral economics and decision choice are exploding and I'm interested in seeing how habit formation adds to them. I look forward to the author's book being released later this month