AMOS – A probability-driven, customer-oriented decision support system for target marketing of solo mailings

We describe a state-of-the-art, probabilistic-based system, nicknamed AMOS, to support the marketing decisions of Franklin Mint, a leading Philadelphia-based worldwide direct response marketer of quality collectibles and luxury and home decor products. The purpose of the system is to target the ‘right’ audiences for each promotion from among a very large marketing database, based on the customers' attributes and characteristics. Due to the dimension and complexity of the decision problem, AMOS was developed as a hybrid system involving expert system concepts to address semi-structural and ‘fuzzy’ issues and traditional optimization and statistical models to address well-defined structural issues and decision problems. The system has been implemented in 1992, and currently constitutes the primary promotion selection for the Franklin Mint, applied for all solo mailings in the US which meet minimum size requirements and statistical validity.