A Real-Time Mechanism for Targeted Dynamic Personalization1

The strategic role of the consumer in the Internet economy clearly reshapes the meaning of marketing concept leading to separate the traditional marketing from the marketing in Electronic Retailing. The active involvement of the consumer in the shopping process could be utilized by the marketers so as to design new products and develop product and marketing strategies. Marketers, enabled by the advances in technology, target their customers on a more personalized, segmented and customized basis. The Targeting Mechanism introduced in this paper, can be seen as an efficient personalized marketing and one-to-one customization technique, which can realize segmentation and consumer targeting on a real-time basis. It is a set of software components that can be easily integrated into existing electronic commerce systems in order to provide personalized services (such as targeted advertisements), ‘narrowcasting’ promotion techniques (such as couponing, e-mail discount alerts, recommendations), etc.