'Market Of One' Becomes Real With Software From Israeli Firm

ByDoug Bartholomew Even in this era of the Internet, the Holy Grail of marketers -- the ability to pitch products to a "market of one"-- has remained an elusive goal at best. Now an Israeli software firm, Sagarmatha Ltd., promises to do just that with its Personal Promotion Builder (PPB) system designed for both traditional and online retailers. A developer of data mining and consumer personalization software, Sagarmatha, with U.S. headquarters in Marietta, Ga., earlier this month unveiled PPB, a promotion-building system. The software analyzes customer loyalty and other purchase characteristics and generates personalized consumer incentives for distribution by direct mail, Web sites, e-mail, kiosks, cell phones and PDAs. The package uses Sagarmatha's data-mining system to sift through and analyze thousands of customer data points. The system is being used by Israel's largest pharmacy chain to analyze its loyalty club database, which contains information compiled largely from point-of-sale data. PPB produces an optimized set of personalized coupons for each customer. The result was that the average shopping basket per loyalty club member grew by 24% in 2001. More than three-fourths of the chain's loyal shoppers use at least one coupon each month.