Profiling
This sort of number crunching is called "profiling." Profiling is a data surveillance technique that generates prospects or suspects within a large population, in part by inferring a set of characteristics of a particular class of people from past experiences, then searching data-holdings for individuals with a close fit to that set of characteristics. [1]Though we're focusing on marketing here, profiling has applications for government (the IRS has used profiling to predict the 'audit potential' of individual's tax returns [2]), law enforcement (to develop profiles of drug dealers, child molesters, arsonists.[3]), political and public interest campaigning (Christian Coalition's "grassroots" mailings).
[1] Clarke, Roger (1993) "Profiling: A Hidden Challenge to the Regulation of Data Surveillance," Journal of Law and Information Science.
[2] Rule, J.B. (1974) "Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age," Schocken Books.
[3] Marx, G.T. & Reichman, N. (1984) "Rountinising the Discovery of Secrets," American Behavior Scientist 27,4 (March/April 1984) 423-452.
