He said, “You can’t measure taste.” I said, “Want to bet?”

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

A few weeks ago I met a gentleman who said I couldn’t predict what his customers would do. “Our customers’ tastes dictate what they’ll buy,” he told me, “and you can’t measure an intangible like taste.”

He was quite surprised when I told him we’d been doing it for years. And I suspect he didn’t quite believe me until I showed him how we do it.

At Loyalty Builders we measure taste using the algorithms we’ve developed over the last 10 years. With this proprietary math we can predict the likelihood of each individual customer buying each individual product. The methodology scales nicely so the number of customers and products is, for practical purposes, unlimited.

Some probabilities will come up zero. But the ones that don’t are valuable insight into what customers are likely to buy next, a virtual “taste profile” for each customer that turns out be an extremely useful marketing tool.

“And the best part,” I told him, “is that I can do it with data you already own – customer transaction data that’s already in your files.  It’s sitting there doing nothing,” I said.  “Why not use it?”

Taste can absolutely be measured. We do it every day.

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