Explorative multi-objective optimization of marketing campaigns for the fashion retail industry

We show how an exploratory tool for association rule mining can be used for efficient multi-objective optimization of marketing campaigns for companies within the fashion retail industry. We have earlier designed and implemented a novel digital tool for mining of association rules from given basket data. The tool supports efficient finding of frequent itemsets over multiple hierarchies and interactive visualization of corresponding association rules together with numerical attributes. Normally when optimizing a marketing campaign, factors that cause an increased level of activation among the recipients could in fact reduce the profit, i.e., these factors need to be balanced, rather than optimized individually. Using the tool we can identify important factors that influence the search for an optimal campaign in respect to both activation and pro fit. We show empirical results from a real-world case-study using campaign data from a well-established company within the fashion retail industry, demonstrating how activation and profit can be simultaneously targeted, using computer-generated algorithms as well as human-controlled visualization.