Developing the profiles of supermarket customers through data mining

To stay competitive, supermarkets need to develop a viable customer retention strategy. Since a key to the successful development of such a strategy rests with customer relationship management, supermarkets should identify the most profitable ways to build and maintain a loyal customer relationship. In an effort to help supermarkets understand their customers' shopping/patronage behaviour and the ways to retain valued customers, we propose data mining techniques. Using the examples of franchised supermarkets in the south-eastern United States, this paper illustrates the usefulness of the proposed data mining techniques for examining customer grocery shopping behaviour and developing the profiles of loyal patrons.