To compantes trying to understand and predict customer behavior, the web promised the kind of information that marketing dreams are made of. It could electronically track every customer's action and make some very good guesses about their thoughts. Are cybernauts just looking at products that are blue and green? How many seconds did they spend looking at a particular item? Which competitor's digital storefront did a customer visit right before coming to our site? What does a five-year history of that customer's purchases look like? What are the characteristics of the most profitable 10% of the company's customers? Over the past few years companies have become adept at aggregating and analyzing this sort of information in order to spot sales trends and do product analysis. Besides harvesting bits and bytes of data on the web, they've also mined their kiosks, stores on Main Street, and warehouses to gain insights not only into customers but also into their distributors and suppliers. For many veteran marketers that mass of data is a coveted asset.
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