Year
2008
Authors
DE BRUYN Arnaud, TRAMONTE N.
Abstract
Firms use external data sources (e.g., Census Bureau data) to infer the most likely age, income, housing situation or marital status of their customers, and better portray their profiles and needs. In this paper, we show that the methodology commonly used in the industry is severely biased towards average national figures. We discuss a maximum likelihood approach to correct for these biases. Taking the example of first name analysis to infer customers’age, we show that the approach we suggest gives much more precise and unbiased estimates, allowing marketers to better profile their customers and tailor their marketing strategy more precisely to their customers’ characteristics.
DE BRUYN, A. et TRAMONTE, N. (2008). How to Profile your Customers Using Collaborative Database Profiling: An Application to Age Estimation. Dans: Proceedings of the 37th EMAC Conference. European Marketing Academy (EMAC).