An integrated customer segmentation method for China's supermarkets

Abstract

For a customer-based supermarket, usually two types of data are available. One is demographic data, and the other is transactional data. Most of previous researchers and practitioners mainly focus on solely utilizing either type of data to segment customers. To obtain a stable and implementable consumer segmentation methodology with high efficiency and product recommendation accuracy for targeted customers, we propose an integrated customer segmentation method which takes advantages and avoids pitfalls of both the demographic information and the customer transactional data. As in the context of China's supermarkets, it is developed to reveal customer psychological behavior of shopping in supermarket. This method is theoretically validated and verified in a real China supermarket case. © 2010 IEEE.