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INFLUENTIAL MARKETING: A NEW DIRECT MARKETING STRATEGY ADDRESSING THE EXISTENCE OF VOLUNTARY BUYERS

The traditional direct marketing paradigm implicitly assumes that there is no possibility of a customer purchasing the product unless he receives the direct promotion. In real business environments, however, there are "voluntary buyers" who will make the purchase even without marketing contact. While no direct promotion is needed for voluntary buyers, the traditional response-driven paradigm tends to target such customers. In this thesis, the traditional paradigm is examined in detail. We argue that it cannot maximize the net profit. Therefore, we introduce a new direct marketing strategy, called "influential marketing." To achieve the maximum net profit, influential marketing targets only the customers who can be positively influenced by the campaign. Nevertheless, targeting such customers is not a trivial task. We present a novel and practical solution to this problem which requires no major changes to standard practices. The evaluation of our approach on real data provides promising results.