Mining customer knowledge for electronic catalog marketing

Direct marketing is the use of the telephone and non-personal media to communicate product and organizational information to customers, who then can purchase products via mail, telephone, or the Internet. In contrast, catalog marketing is a type of marketing in which an organization provides a catalog from which customers make selections and place orders by mail or telephone. However, most catalogs for retailing firms are presented to customers in the format of paper catalogs without strategic segmentation design and implementation. In this regard, electronic catalog design and marketing could be a method to integrate the Internet and catalog marketing using market segmentation in order to enhance the effectiveness of direct marketing and sales management in retailing. This paper uses data mining based on association rules from relational database design and implementation for mining customer knowledge. As result, marketing knowledge patterns and rules are extracted for the electronic catalog marketing and sales management of a retailing mall in Taiwan. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.