Neural networks and customer grouping in e-commerce: a framework using fuzzy ART

This paper introduces a proposed neural network-based data mining method that utilizes a company's internal data about customers for the purpose of marketing strategies such as target marketing and direct marketing. Unlike past data mining approaches that put market survey or customer feedback data into input values, the fuzzy ART neural network proposed in this paper takes a customer's purchasing history as input values and clusters similar customers into groups. Step by step procedures of how to implement the fuzzy ART algorithm are provided and practical considerations for it to be used in marketing management in the context of electronic commerce are discussed.