At 07:12 PM 1/1/2003, Mike Rosing wrote:
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote:
> * I expect most uses of "customer courtesy cards" are to try to get
> some kind of brand loyalty going. People thinking "Well, I have a card
> at Albertson's, but not at Safeway, so I'll go to Albertson's."
They'd love that, but know better.
> * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not
> yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me.
The goals of loyalty cards in supermarkets are to
identify actionable patterns. Apparently they have theories
which the data allows them to test, and, they also just
unleash a neural net or other algorithm to find patterns.
They want to know what "type" of customers they have in what
numbers. This "segmentation", I seem to understand
that supermarkets want to position affinity products together,
in the store and maybe in the ads.
Chains can make inferences based on what they know
nationwide but the customers can be quite different from one
store to another, they can't put the same product mix, in the
same location, for all Safeways.
Its not enough to put the chips next to the beer. They want
to examining the layout of all their shelf space.
The cash register data alone, is enough to do this, but
it doesn't work very well for shoppers who come and
buy chips on tuesday and beer on wednesday. The
card lets them associate your whole shopping cart
for the month.
Todd
