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F E A T U R E

It's the Information, Stupid

September 30, 2002
By Lori MacVittie

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Everybody's Doing It

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Down to the Numbers
	The Whys and Hows
	Executive Summary
	Everybody's Doing It
	Epoll Results

All kinds of businesses are using BI tools to part customers from their money.

Insurance: A Fortune 500 insurance company uses BI tools to create new products targeted at specific demographics within their existing customer base. If you wonder why you've been getting calls about new products, it's probably because a BI solution targeted you as "likely to purchase."

Retail: In many supermarket chains, you will find beer displayed next to diapers. Business intelligence tools found that when young fathers ran out to buy diapers, they often picked up beer. To increase sales, retail stores moved the beer closer to the diapers to make the purchase more convenient. Beer sales did, indeed, increase.

Pharmaceutical: A research company used BI tools to correlate the prescriptions written by doctors based on such esoteric variables as the weather and day of the week. Armed with that information, the company provided valuable marketing data to pharmaceutical companies. A hint on their findings--visit your doctor on a cloudy day.