A couple items from "A Potent New Tool for Selling: Database Marketing" by Jonathan Berry, John Verity, Kathleen Kerwin, Gail DeGeorge. BusinessWeek, 9/5/94.:
"We basically store every transaction, " says [American Express exec.] Hill. Now, 70 workstations at the American Express Decision Sciences center in Phoenix race through mountains of data on millians of AmEx cardmembers--the stores they shop in, the places they travel to, the restaurants they've eaten in, and even the economic conditions and weather in the areas where they live.
***
GM went into the credit-card business not just to build loyalty and offer cardholders rebates on cars but also because it saw the billing process as a way to harvest reams of data about consumers. "This is a gold mine," says H.D. "Hand" Weed, general marketing manager for the GM card.
