The Online Customer: New Data Mining and Marketing Approaches By ...

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Introduction

As technology advances, businesses are able to gather an enormous amount of data in their day-to-day operations. This increase in available data has accelerated the adoption of data mining techniques in marketing practice. Acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers is a vital goal of every customer-oriented organization. Toward this end, both data mining and marketing research communities are trying to find solutions to help businesses achieve this goal through marketing strategies such as market segmentation (Kleinberg et al. 1998, Wedel and Kamakura 1998), direct marketing (Pijls et al. 2001, Chiang et al. 2003), targeted marketing (Chauchat et al. 2001, Shaffer and Zhang 1995), personalization/customization (Goldberg et al. 1992, Ansari et al. 2000, Cooke et al. 2002), market basket analysis/cross selling (Manchanda 1999, Brijs 2000) and customer lifetime value (McDougall 1997, Mani 1999).

The above marketing strategies have always been the subject of study in the field of marketing since they are really at the core of marketing.