Many marketers believe one of the most powerful competitive weapons is understanding and targeting each customer's individual needs. To this end, more companies are harnessing DM techniques to shed light on customer preferences and buying patterns. With this information, companies can better target customers with products and promotional offerings.
A.C. Nielsen's Spotlight is a good example of a DM tool. Nielsen clients use Spotlight to mine point-of-sale databases. These terabyte-size databases contain facts (e.g., quantities sold, dates of sale, prices) about thousands of products, tracked across hundreds of geographic areas for at least 125 weeks. Spotlight transforms tasks that would take a human from weeks to months to do into tasks a compu
ter can do in minutes to hours. Nielsen says it has sold about 100 copies of Spotlight (DOS and Windows) to U.S. clients, who have in turn deployed it to field-sales representatives in multiple regional centers. The software frees analysts to work on higher-level projects instead of being swamped by routine, laborious chores.
In the past two years, a global group at Nielsen has changed the U.S. version of Spotlight for use in other countries. "Spotlight is the most widely distributed application in the consumer packaged-goods industry," claims Mark Ahrens, director of custom software sales at Nielsen.
American Express is analyzing the shopping patterns of its card holders and using the information to offer targeted promotions.
Expert System Module
illustration_link (21 Kbytes)
Heuristic pattern-recognition rules analyze database data, then output graphs, tables, or text, as appropriate.
Marketing
