Artificial Intelligence Marketing

Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AIM) is still at an early stage but the widespread of high performant and affordable technologies and the advance, documentation and approachability of Artificial Intelligence mean that AI is now a more plausible solution to the pursuit of the one to one customer relationship. There is no doubt that this is a growing area and formalisation in this type of marketing activities will occurs in the coming years.

AIM is a form of Direct marketing leveraging Database marketing techniques as well as AI concept and model such as Machine Learning and Bayesian Network. The main difference resides in the reasoning part which suggests it is performed by computer and algorithm instead of human.

Behavioral Targeting

Artificial Intelligence Marketing provides a set of tools and techniques that enable behavioral targeting.

Collect, Reason, Act

Artificial Intelligence Marketing principle is based on the Perception-Reasoning-action cycle you find in Cognitive science. In marketing context this cycle is adapted to form the collect, reason and act cycle.

Collect

This term relates to all activities which aims at capturing customer or prospect data. Whether taken online or offline these data are then saved into customer or prospect databases.

Reason

This is the part where data is transformed into information and eventually intelligence or Insight. This is the section where Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in particularly have a key role to play.

Act

With the intelligence gathered from the "reason" step above you can then "act". In Marketing context act would be some sort of communications that would attempt to influence a prospect or customer purchase decision using incentive driven message

Again Artificial Intelligence has a role to play in this stage as well. Ultimately in an unsupervised model the machine would take the decision and act accordingly to the information it receives at the "collect" stage.

Machine Learning

"Machine Learning is concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to "learn"."

As defined above Machine Learning is one of the techniques that can be employed to enable more effective behavioral targeting

Concerns

As mentioned in the behavioral targeting article :

"Many online users & advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is an area that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to minimize through education, advocacy & product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to use opt-in and permission from end-users (permission marketing)."

References

*Baesens Bart, Stijn Viaene, Dirk Van den Poel, Jan Vanthienen, and Guido Dedene.(2002), “ [http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/rugrugwps/02_2F154.htm Bayesian Neural Network Learning for Repeat Purchase Modelling in Direct Marketing] ”, "European Journal of Operational Research", 138 (1), 191-211.
*Lou Hirsh (2002), " [http://www.crm-daily.com/perl/story/18001.html How Artificial Intelligence Decodes Customer Behavior] ", "CRMDaily.com".
*Yahoo Research Center [http://research.yahoo.com/Machine_Learning Machine Learning] .