Customers have to make choices in order to buy configurable products. Do they make these choices at random, or are there patterns? When we look at the sales history for a configurable product, like a car or a computer, can we tell if customers have just been flipping coins and rolling dice? Or do their choices hang together and make sense? To answer this question, we would have to look at how they buy combinations of options. In the previous post, I took a pizza as a simple configurable product, and looked at how customers ordered pairs of toppings. Just by looking at the sales numbers we could detect that the selection of pineapple and Canadian bacon are not independent. Even if we had never heard of a Hawaiian Pizza, we could discover it in the data.

Even more information is hidden in combinations of three toppings at a time, or four toppings at a time. Any combination of toppings will have appeared on some of the pizzas that have been sold (or maybe none). The relative popularities of all the different combinations has a clear message: customers are not flipping coins. Some toppings naturally go together, and others do not. Pepperoni, broccoli, and anchovies is just unlikely. If a particular pizza restaurant has a few “house specials”, like the Meat Lovers and the Veggie Delight, we can see them in the data, even if we don’t know their names.

What is true of the pizza is also true of other configurable products: computers, trucks, tractors, lighting fixtures, industrial fans, and so on. All products that have variety.  Customers make choices, but not by rolling dice. There are combinations that go together and combinations that do not. A pizza maker can juggle the preferences of his customers in his head. But when a product has 30 or more features, intuition is overwhelmed. The number of combinations explodes so fast that the unaided human mind can’t see the patterns. At this point, mathematical models and intense number crunching can reveal the patterns and let the product manager for a line of trucks be as confident as a pizza maker.

Do Customer Buying Patterns Exist?

Buying patterns are real, and they manifest themselves in how customers buy combinations of options. With the computing power we have available today we can detect and capture them. These patterns can then be used to design “house specials”, forecast future sales, and guide customers to what we want to sell them.

So, who else is talking about customer buying patterns?

Intel Talks about Changing technology buying patterns

However - buying patterns are constantly changing.  As social networking grows, we are watching new markets emerge every day.   There is gold for companies who can continually detect these patterns and offer the right products and feature mix.