The model catalog

The catalog is a set of named models, each a ranking from 0 to 1 over the people it can see. Models differ by what they read. This page is organized by kind of model. The product shows the full live list, with each model’s card and current reading.

Buying windows

A recent episode of research that is still warm and will expire on its own. A buying window is absolute: a person is in it or not, and leaves it when the research stops. Life changes open windows in which habits and preferences are more open to change (Andreasen, 1984; Verplanken and Roy, 2016); see research note 2.

Examples: Is about to install a whole-home system. Is shopping for the tax preparer.

Habits and shopping manner

Repeated behavior over weeks, read relative to everyone else: how a person tends to shop, save and spend, and how they spend their time. Behavior repeated in a stable setting becomes habitual, and for such behavior past frequency predicts future behavior (Ouellette and Wood, 1998; Wood et al., 2002).

Examples: Waits for the markdown window. Answers direct response. Earmarks toward named goals. Trades down under pressure.

Traits

A stable lean between two ends of a scale, read across categories rather than within one. A trait names both ends, so a person who leans one way is described by that end, not by the absence of the other. Research with digital records shows that stable dispositions can be estimated from behavior (Youyou et al., 2015); see research note 3 for that research and its limits.

Reasons

Why a person buys, read the same way in any category. A reason describes what tends to move a group, which is what an audience group’s angle is built on. Means-end research describes how product attributes matter for the consequences and values they serve (Gutman, 1982). See Audience groups.

Work

What a person does for work and how, from job families to the kind of role a person holds.

How the catalog changes

• Releases, not edits. The catalog changes by release. Each release passes the release gates before any client sees it.
• Retired IDs stay retired. A retired model’s ID is never reused, so an old audience or file never silently changes meaning.
• Each model carries its reading. Works, evidence short, not read yet, under the minimum, or nobody. See Quality, coverage and freshness.

What a client is offered

A model is offered only when its behavior is witnessed in the data and it finds enough people. A model without witnessed evidence, or under the minimum size, is not offered, and its card says why. The product shows each client the models it can use today.