Chapter 6 – 6.2 Data Warehouse{0}
Michael Berlin
Chapter 6 – 6.2 Data Warehouse
I was able to find a great article about Data Warehousing at stores.org, the information is how “Blockbuster Aims To Improve its Customer Communications.” Blockbuster’s plan is to use Data Warehousing to collect customer information on how they buy or rent items in the Blockbuster stores. Before a Data Warehouse program was in place, Blockbuster did not have very strong data about what their customers liked. The only thing they knew was the customers were renting or buying videos and that was just about it.
With the Data Warehouse program installed Blockbuster gained multiple items of information about every customer that came into a Blockbuster store throughout the country. The company now had rental history, age brackets, gender, and much more to select form to define a specific group and advertise to them directly. Blockbuster was now able to select a topic of movies such as comedies and it would list the comedy selection rented out for the week. They could narrow the search with adding gender and age to the selection and get a much narrower selection on what specific people are watching. With this the store could then contact these people directly about upcoming comedy releases through the internet, phone, or snail mail to advertise to them.
This article is tied directly to data warehousing and I liked it because I am a blockbuster customer and I get advertisements about upcoming movies through my Blockbuster website. Sometimes the list is just about new releases and it does not target me specifically, but when I look up a movie or past history of rentals the website gives me a list of five to ten others that I may like or that are similar. I believe this article reaches most students in our class, because we probably all watch movies and rent them through Blockbuster or Netflix and I believe they have a data warehouse as well. So it is something we all use or are a part of in our daily lives.
Amato, Deena M.. (April, 2003). Stores.org. In Blockbuster Aims To Improve its Customer
Communication. Retrieved October 2, 2010, from