Meaningful Encounters of the Second Kind

Although technology still can't mimic complex human relationships, understanding the way your customers think may be the next step in personalization

Data mining at its best keeps in mind the potential dynamics of customer thinking. You get more benefits when you think about customers as having conceptual processes rather than just fitting into categories.

What are the suppositions held by differing groups at a given time? How do they change? How do organizing themes lead to conclusions, other suppositions, or resulting actions? For example, market basket analysis determines the connections between goods - beer implies chips, for example. But these are not just product relationships. They offer insight into individual customer thinking.

Joe-1 is a "beer implies potato chips, Coke implies ice, and steak implies potatoes" kind of guy. Sue-2 is a "books implies books on tape implies classical CDs" kind of gal. Will they ever get together? Maybe not, but you have more to work with if you think about implicative thinking, not just dollars spent on given categories.

I have often found useful predictive behavior patterns associated with "thinking" patterns. My company found many interesting and actionable patterns of this sort in a study it performed on behalf of a large retail store. To pull some simple examples from a very rich study, we found: People who thought like Joe-1 showed more brand loyalty and were price sensitive. People who thought like Sue-2 liked to try new things and bought based on interest and quality rather than price.

These higher levels of interpretations open up far more interesting ideas for target marketing approaches, which you can overlay onto the more simple product promotions or cross-sells. For example, we found that discounts on their specific favorite products get the Joe-1 types into the store. Sue-2 types have increased response to the more exotic brands that cross-link to items they have already bought.

Structuring media, such as links on a Web site, to how individuals think also makes a lot of sense. Different peoples' minds just work in different ways.

For example, some people prefer the concrete before the abstract, the example before the theory, the particular before the general, the practical before the forward looking, the current before the historical, or various other combinations. Good teachers adjust their lectures to meet audience needs, sometimes changing directions on the fly. You get the most resonant response when you structure modes of explanation to benefit the thinking styles of your target audience.

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Some search engines use clickstream data to categorize customers as well as sites. By thinking in terms of process, you can use a person's click paths to determine the most appropriate presentation style that will give you the most resonant response.

In addition, if a search engine could learn your associative process and how you tend to search, it could organize the results more attuned to how you think: listing ideas that would be most relevant for you first, with secondary ideas next.

You must be careful not to redefine words in terms of what technology can do today to leave room to figure the technology for the future. Exploring the full depths of meanings can be a bountiful exercise.

Barry Grushkin is principal and founder of the Machine Intelligence Co., specializing in deep, insightful data mining and comparative analysis of business intelligence techniques and technologies.