Cover Story: REI Treks Ahead

Working with Nick Radcliffe from the Boston-based Quadstone, a division of customer interaction management software provider Portrait Software, REI found that customers who have the highest model score don’t necessarily have the highest difference score. Comparing the incremental model to the traditional one showed that the regular model “didn’t do a good job at all of pushing the best incremental customers to the top of the model,” Bowcut says. “There really is no pattern to incremental sales.”