Feature-based recommendations for one-to-one marketing

Most recommendation systems face challenges from products that change with time, such as popular or seasonal products, since traditional market basket analysis or collaborative filtering analysis are unable to recommend new products to customers due to the fact that the products are not yet purchased by customers. Although the recommendation systems can find customer groups that have similar interests as target customers, brand new products often lack ratings and comments. Similarly, products that are less often purchased, such as furniture and home appliances, have fewer records of ratings; therefore, the chances of being recommended are often lower. This research attempts to analyze customers' purchasing behaviors based on product features from transaction records and product feature databases. Customers' preferences toward particular features of products are analyzed and then rules of customer interest profiles are thus drawn in order to recommend customers products that have potential attraction with customers. The advantage of this research is its ability of recommending to customers brand new products or rarely purchased products as long as they fit customer interest profiles; a deduction which traditional market basket analysis and collaborative filtering methods are unable to do. This research uses a two-stage clustering technique to find customers that have similar interests as target customers and recommend products to fit customers' potential requirements. Customers' interest profiles can explain recommendation results and the interests on particular features of products can be referenced for product development, while a one-to-one marketing strategy can improve profitability for companies.     

A dynamic decision support system to predict the value of customer for new product development

In recent years, firms have focused on how to enter markets and meet customer requirements by improving product attributes and processes to boost their market share and profits. Consequently, market-driven product design and development has become a popular topic in the literature. However, past research neither covers all of the major influencing factors that together drive customers to make purchase decisions, nor connects these various influencing factors to customer purchasing behavior. Past studies further fail to take the time value of money and customer value into consideration. This study proposes a decision support system to (a) predict customer purchasing behavior given certain product, customer, and marketing influencing factors, and (b) estimate the net customer lifetime value from customer purchasing behavior toward a specific product. This will not only enable decision-makers to compare alternatives and select competitive products to launch on the market, but will also improve the understanding of customer behavior toward particular products for the formulation of effective marketing strategies that increase customer loyalty and generate greater profits in the long term. Decision-makers can also make use of the system to build up confidence in new product development in terms of idea generation and product improvement. The application of the proposed system is illustrated and confirmed to be sensible and convincing through a case study.     

Know your customer: computing <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-most promising products for targeted marketing

The advancement of World Wide Web has revolutionized the way the manufacturers can do business. The manufacturers can collect customer preferences for products and product features from their sales and other product-related Web sites to enter and sustain in the global market. For example, the manufactures can make intelligent use of these customer preference data to decide on which products should be selected for targeted marketing. However, the selected products must attract as many customers as possible to increase the possibility of selling more than their respective competitors. This paper addresses this kind of product selection problem. That is, given a database of existing products P from the competitors, a set of company’s own products Q, a dataset C of customer preferences and a positive integer k, we want to find k-most promising products (k-MPP) from Q with maximum expected number of total customers for targeted marketing. We model k-MPP query and propose an algorithmic framework for processing such query and its variants. Our framework utilizes grid-based data partitioning scheme and parallel computing techniques to realize k-MPP query. The effectiveness and efficiency of the framework are demonstrated by conducting extensive experiments with real and synthetic datasets.     

Deep sentiment analysis: Mining the causality between personality-value-attitude for analyzing business ads in social media

IT vendors routinely use social media such as YouTube not only to disseminate their IT product information, but also to acquire customer input efficiently as part of their market research strategies. Customer responses that appear in social media, however, are typically unstructured; thus, a fairly large data set is needed for meaningful analysis. Although identifying customers’ value structures and attitudes may be useful for developing targeted or niche markets, the unstructured and volume-heavy nature of customer data prohibits efficient and economical extraction of such information. Automatic extraction of customer information would be valuable in determining value structure and strength. This paper proposes an intelligent method of estimating causality between user profiles, value structures, and attitudes based on the replies and published content managed by open social network systems such as YouTube. To show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper, information richness and agility are used as underlying concepts to create performance measures based on media/information richness theory. The resulting deep sentiment analysis proves to be superior to legacy sentiment analysis tools for estimation of causality among the focal parameters.     

Customer segmentation issues and strategies for an automobile dealership with two clustering techniques

Companies can use customer segmentation to group customers with similar characteristics together and identify the differences between groups to develop marketing strategies. This study investigates the problem of customer segmentation in relation to automotive customer relationship management and presents a real case study of an automobile dealer in Taiwan. Although several past studies have adopted different clustering techniques with which to group customer attributes, few have simultaneously considered customer transaction behaviour and customer satisfaction variables. In addition, most previous work has used only a single clustering method for customer segmentation, which results in unreliable results and leads to inadequate marketing decisions. Therefore, in this study, we consider two clustering techniques, k‐means and expectation maximization, and compare their results for correctness. The experimental results show that four customer groups are identified with both clustering methods: loyal, potential, VIP and churn customer groups. Based on the segmentation results, several customized marketing strategies aimed at each of the four customer groups are suggested to improve the quality of services for effective customer relationship management.     

基于RFM模型的随机森林算法对民航客户的流失分析

近几年,随着航空市场的快速发展,对于航空公司而言,如何在增加市场占有率的同时,对客户的流失进行有效的控制也刻不容缓.基于随机森林算法,根据航空客户数据,建立流失预测模型,对客户是否已流失进行预测研究,将传统的RFM客户价值模型进行改进,结合随机森林算法对客户流失进行预测.实验结果表明,基于RFM模型的随机森林算法构建的...     

Selecting prospects for cross-selling financial products using multivariate credibility

Insurance policies or credit instruments are financial products that involve a long-term relationship between the customer and the company. For many companies a possible way to expand its business is to sell more products to preferred customers in its portfolio. Data on the customers’ past behaviour is stored in the company’s database and these data can be used to assess whether or not more products should be offered to a specific customer. In particular, data on past claiming history, for insurance products, or past information on defaulting, for banking products, can be useful for determining how the client is expected to behave in other financial products. This study implements a method for using historical information of each individual customer, and the portfolio as a whole, to select a target group of customers to whom it would be interesting to offer more products. This research can help to improve marketing to existing customers and to earn higher profits for the company.     

Mining customer knowledge for electronic catalog marketing

Direct marketing is the use of the telephone and non-personal media to communicate product and organizational information to customers, who then can purchase products via mail, telephone, or the Internet. In contrast, catalog marketing is a type of marketing in which an organization provides a catalog from which customers make selections and place orders by mail or telephone. However, most catalogs for retailing firms are presented to customers in the format of paper catalogs without strategic segmentation design and implementation. In this regard, electronic catalog design and marketing could be a method to integrate the Internet and catalog marketing using market segmentation in order to enhance the effectiveness of direct marketing and sales management in retailing. This paper uses data mining based on association rules from relational database design and implementation for mining customer knowledge. As result, marketing knowledge patterns and rules are extracted for the electronic catalog marketing and sales management of a retailing mall in Taiwan.     

大数据环境下精准客户定位的社交网络分析

大数据为企业进行精准营销提供了重要支撑,精准营销能提升营销效果,提高客户满意度,精准营销的前提是客户识别与选择。通过分析网络个体与群体特征,社交网络分析能够定位核心价值客户。首先对社交网络的中心性进行分析,探讨社交网络节点地位与营销效果的关系,运用社群识别方法,对社交网络进行分群,提出并用MapReduce实现了针对大规模社交网络的社群划分RMCL方法。在此基础上,构建了客户影响度与客户影响因子等指标,并结合中心度指标,定位社群的核心节点,并采用分类回归树方法,研究了社交网络结构与客户消费响应关系,并确定了变量重要性,为企业采取客户差异化营销组合策略提供指导。     

Discovering patterns of online purchasing behaviour and a new‐product‐launch strategy

Spurred by rapid development of computers and Internet technology, online shopping is gradually overtaking in‐store shopping, because of advantages such as convenience, more choice of products or services etc. Online stores must devote a great deal of time and resources to locating and attracting new customers. Growing a customer base requires first understanding customers and then providing the products or services they need, thus encouraging customers to purchase more. This paper develops a system to analyse customers’ purchasing behaviour and track shifts in their interests. Customers’ purchasing behaviour is measured using proposed standard product loyalty status and standard brand loyalty status. Using these metrics, together with the preference map established for each customer, a marketing specialist can easily locate potential customers to target when a company launches a new product. The new‐product‐launch strategy proposed in this paper can be used to create a list of potential customers for a product being launched under a variety of conditions. A prototype system has been built to test the feasibility of the proposed new‐product‐launch strategy. The result shows almost 40% of potential customers respond to the recommendation positively.     

K-means算法在电信CRM客户分类中的应用

面对电信市场竞争的日益加剧和信息技术的迅猛发展,电信运营商必须建立以“客户为中心”的管理模式。将客户进行分类,针对不同的客户,研究出相应的营销策略。数据挖掘中的K—means聚类算法能对大型数据集进行高效分类。对K—means算法进行改进,使其能够应用于复杂的电信客户关系管理,实现更加准确和全面的客户分类。     

Conjoint analysis for IPTV service

Given the upcoming introduction of IPTV service in Korea, it is necessary to develop business models and marketing strategies to improve customer satisfaction and succeed in market competition. We use conjoint analysis to estimate customer preferences and the relative importance of service factors. Based on results from total customers’ and clustered customers’ service preferences, we propose marketing strategies for service providers.     

基于数据挖掘的银行客户细分模型

随着银行客户的增多,如何对客户进行分类,制定有针对性的营销策略,保留住优质客户,是银行客户关系管理的重要内容。本文利用X-means算法建立银行客户细分模型,为银行决策者提供科学的决策支持。     

Mining demand chain knowledge of life insurance market for new product development

Demand chain management (DCM) can be defined as “extending the view of operations from a single business unit or a company to the whole chain. Essentially, demand chain management focuses not only on generating drawing power from customers to purchase merchandises on the supply chain; but also on exploring satisfaction, participation, and involvement from customers in order for enterprises to understand customer needs and wants. Thus, customers have changed their position in the demand chain to assume a leading role in bringing more benefit for enterprises. This article investigates what functionalities best fit the consumers’ needs and wants for life insurance products by extracting specific knowledge patterns and rules from consumers and their demand chain. By doing so, this paper uses the a priori algorithm and clustering analysis as methodologies for data mining. Knowledge extraction from data mining results is illustrated as market segments and demand chain analysis on life insurance market in Taiwan in order to propose suggestions and solutions to the insurance firms for new product development and marketing.     

Market segmentation and ideal point identification for new product design using fuzzy data compression and fuzzy clustering methods

In product design, various methodologies have been proposed for market segmentation, which group consumers with similar customer requirements into clusters. Central points on market segments are always used as ideal points of customer requirements for product design, which reflects particular competitive strategies to effectively reach all consumers’ interests. However, existing methodologies ignore the fuzziness on consumers’ customer requirements. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed to perform market segmentation based on consumers’ customer requirements, which exist fuzziness. The methodology is an integration of a fuzzy compression technique for multi-dimension reduction and a fuzzy clustering technique. It first compresses the fuzzy data regarding customer requirements from high dimensions into two dimensions. After the fuzzy data is clustered into marketing segments, the centre points of market segments are used as ideal points for new product development. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology in market segmentation and identification of the ideal points for new product design is demonstrated using a case study of new digital camera design.     

A Dominance-based Rough Set Approach to customer behavior in the airline market

Market segmentation is a crucial activity in the present business environment. Data mining is a useful tool for identifying customer behavior patterns in large amounts of data. This information can then be used to help with decision-making in areas such as the airline market. In this study, we use the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) to provide a set of rules for determining customer attitudes and loyalties, which can help managers develop strategies to acquire new customers and retain highly valued ones. A set of rules is derived from a large sample of international airline customers, and its predictive ability is evaluated. The results, as compared with those of multiple discriminate analyses, are very encouraging. They prove the usefulness of the proposed method in predicting the behavior of airline customers. This study demonstrates that the DRSA model helps to identify customers, determine their characteristics, and facilitate the development of a marketing strategy.     

Revealing the dual importance and Kano type of attributes through customer review analytics

Identifying which attributes of a product are important to customers and clarifying how the attributes affect customer satisfaction are critical for a firm to survive and succeed in the market. To assist in characterizing the impacts of various attributes and prioritizing the attributes for design and marketing purposes, this paper proposes a novel review-analytics framework, called importance-Kano (I-Kano) analysis. I-Kano analysis holistically assesses the impacts of various attributes from three different perspectives that potentially may conflict with each other, i.e., appearance (stated importance), significance (derived importance), and Kano type. By fusing term-frequency and sentiment analyses of online reviews with conjoint analysis, the I-Kano analysis simultaneously identifies the dual importance (appearance and significance) and Kano type of an attribute. As the final deliverable of the I-Kano analysis, a new visualization scheme, called the I-Kano matrix, is proposed, which is the first attempt to integrate the dual importance and Kano type of multiple attributes in a single chart. The I-Kano matrix facilitates an intuitive interpretation of the multidimensional impacts of various attributes and supports the aggregation and comparison of the results from different market segments. Through the I-Kano analysis, the attributes of great importance in a market segment, which are useful for developing products and planning marketing promotions, can be identified. In addition, the I-Kano analysis can identify the segments of the market in which a certain attribute has greater relative importance, which is helpful in the design differentiation, targeting, and differentiated marketing of products. To demonstrate and validate the I-Kano analysis, an illustrative case study is described with an example of online hotel reviews.     

Towards Circular Economy implementation: an agent-based simulation approach for business model changes

This paper introduces an agent-based approach to study customer behavior in terms of their acceptance of new business models in Circular Economy (CE) context. In a CE customers are perceived as integral part of the business and therefore customer acceptance of new business models becomes crucial as it determines the successful implementation of CE. However, tools or methods are missing to capture customer behavior to assess how customers will react if an organization introduces a new business model such as leasing or functional sales. The purpose of this research is to bring forward a quantitative analysis tool for identifying proper marketing and pricing strategies to obtain best fit demand behavior for the chosen new business model. This tool will support decision makers in determining the impact of introducing new (circular) business models. The model has been developed using an agent-based modeling approach which delivers results based on socio-demographic factors of a population and customers’ relative preferences of product attributes price, environmental friendliness and service-orientation. The implementation of the model has been tested using the practical business example of a washing machine. This research presents the first agent-based tool that can assess customer behavior and determine whether introduction of new business models will be accepted or not and how customer acceptance can be influenced to accelerate CE implementation. The tool integrates socio-demographic factors, product utility functions, social network structures and inter-agent communication in order to comprehensively describe behavior on individual customer level. In addition to the tool itself the results of this research indicates the need for systematic marketing strategies which emphasize CE value propositions in order to accelerate customer acceptance and shorten the transition time from linear to circular. Agent-based models are emphasized as highly capable to fill the gap between diffusion-based penetration of information and resulting behavior in the form of purchase decisions.     

A custom collaboration service system for idea management of mobile phone design

Customized collaborative service (CCS) systems are defined as the e‐services transforming a business process into a collaborative service model and aiming to facilitate interactions with customers and assist the providers in dealing with collaborative strategies and activities. The demand for such services has grown rapidly in a shift of people out of the manufacturing mindset into the service‐dominant mindset. For example, the mobile‐phone market now tends to customization rather than commoditization, and customer‐driven design strategies increasingly substitute for technology‐driven design strategies. This trend accordingly urges the mobile‐phone companies to center on a customer‐centric idea management process to assure customer idea originality but also sustain the process feasibility for realistic product design. However, a method to engineer such CCS systems has not been addressed. This article presents a prototype system named iMobileDesign to exemplify a CCS system. We present a new methodology to engineer this CCS system aiming to achieve semiautomated value coproduction with productivity and satisfaction. This method comprises two parts: simple service machine (SSM) and intelligent service machine (ISM). Usage of SSM and ISM would lead to the formation of analysis and design of the CCS system that joins the service provider efforts with their customers for ensuring a customer‐centric idea management process. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The priority factor model for customer relationship management system success

As the market competition becomes keen, constructing a customer relationship management system is coming to the front for winning over new customers, developing service and products for customer satisfaction and retaining existing customers. However, decisions for CRM implementation have been hampered by inconsistency between information technology and marketing strategies, and the lack of conceptual bases necessary to develop the success measures. Using a structural equation analysis, this study explores the CRM system success model that consists of CRM initiatives: process fit, customer information quality, and system support; intrinsic success: efficiency and customer satisfaction; and extrinsic success: profitability. These constructs underlie much of the existing literature on information system success and customer satisfaction perspectives. We found the empirical support for CRM implementation decision-making from 253 respondents of 14 companies which have implemented the CRM system. These findings should be of great interest to both researchers and practitioners.