Cartogen Launches Consumer Profiling Service

In the UK, retail analysis specialist Cartogen has launched a new service to help e-commerce businesses with consumer profiling by providing access to demographic, lifestyle and behavioural information based on postcode data.

The company uses a profiling system which assigns every UK postcode to one of ten groups and within these, 57 categories. Available information includes brand preferences, leisure activities, newspaper readership and holiday destinations, as well as other geodemographic and financial data.

Founder Stephen Kennedy believes that online businesses are in a unique position because they obtain customer address details with every transaction, allowing them to build extensive databases simply by trading.

'Now for the first time, online traders of any size will have as much information on their customers as they do for web site activity' says Kennedy. 'Painting a clear picture of who is actually purchasing from them will allow businesses to adapt their product offerings and strategies to suit their actual customers, and more effectively target their marketing activities'.

The new service is available by annual subscription, which provides companies with monthly profiling. Standard information such as age, gender, housing type and income is also available.

In the summer, the Brighton-based firm launched a new service to make preliminary analysis of potential new web sites 'effective and affordable' for smaller businesses (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6919.htm ). Its home page is at www.cartogen.co.uk.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.