Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering

It's a long jump from early dot-com collaborative filtering to the world of absolute marketing depicted in Minority Report, but the underlying principle remains the same: gather information about your customers' preferences and purchases in order to increase future sales. Collaborative filtering software pioneers Riedl and Konstan effectively describe the initial steps toward tagging individual consumer likes and dislikes and turning that information into individualized marketing. While most of us may be trying to forget about the super-hyped promise of e-commerce, this book outlines the steps companies have taken to profile online customers and create content that pushes the spending buttons. The authors acknowledge the utter disaster of early online retailing while explaining how the Internet can be used to learn consumer behavior. Though Internet retailing has a tarnished reputation, the future of product marketing is being hammered out online. Readers may roll their eyes at yet more references to the marketing practices of Amazon and Priceline.com, but there really is monumental work being done to match consumer desires with products-and this books details the progress.