Day with a Pro: Michelle Farabaugh, VP of marketing, West Marine

“We also had to do a lot of work on our database. It had never really mattered before what boat type or length a customer owned. Now it was critical that we know,” she says.

To properly target the different catalog versions, Farabaugh explains that West Marine overlaid its database with as much information as possible, asked customers for product affinity information and created a predictive model based on consumer purchasing history to generate customers profiles.