Briefs

New York Times (April 1, 2002) writes how Bluefly, discount apparel e-tailer, is able to better understand customer behaviour by using software from BlueMartini.

With the new software, marketing gurus can design and put a promotion into place in a few minutes, and they can test several promotions simultaneously to find the best results. "More importantly, we can target those promotions by customer group, so we could be running a different promotion for men, women or for bargain shoppers versus high-end brand shoppers," said Mr. Seiff of Bluefly.

The article also discusses Virgin Wines Online, also a customer of Blue Martini.

Other companies, like Amazon and EBags (an online retailer of luggage, etc) have their own, home grown system.

Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, a privacy advocacy organization, said companies that used data-mining software to infer something about a customer should give the customer access to that knowledge, too. "This issue hasn't come up terribly much yet," Mr. Catlett said. "But it will."

Here is full article (free, but registration required).