Appeal No. 2006-1934
Application No. 09/798,833
identifying marketing steps based upon the comparison result. Thus, the claim requires
that the ICV for a customer be computed from the HCV of customers similar to the
customer of interest, that the customer’s individual ICV and HCV are compared and the
results are used to identify marketing steps.
We find that Lazarus teaches a system to predict consumer behavior. The system
creates a grouping of merchants which are frequently shopped at within some number of
transactions or period of time of each other. The transaction data is gathered from credit
card spending data, amount spent and sequence of spending (i.e. historical data which
includes value). See column 3, lines 11 through 25 and column 10, lines 40 through
column 11, line 6. The vendors in the cluster are assigned a merchant vector. See
column 3, lines 32 through 53. Customers also have a profile which includes a consumer
vector, which is a summation of the merchant vectors from recent purchases. See column
3, lines 60 though 65. For each consumer a membership function is used to define how
strongly the consumer is associated with each merchant segment. See column 4, lines 45
through 62. Further, Lazarus teaches, in column 39 lines 5 through 26, that changes in a
customers’ membership functions in successive time intervals are used to predict changes
in spending by a consumer in a segment and are useful in targeting promotional offers.
Thus, we consider Lazarus’ merchant clusters and merchant profiles to represent data of a
set of customers that are similar to the customer of interest, and the customer’s
membership function to with meet the customer’s historic customer value, as it represents
a value to merchants based upon historical data. Further, as Lazarus discusses in column
39, in subsequent time intervals, new membership functions are determined for the
customer, which are based upon the set of data of customers that are similar to the
customer of interest (the merchant clusters and merchant vectors). As such we consider
this to meet the claimed customer’s intrinsic customer value. Lazarus teaches that these
values are compared to develop a result that is used in targeting
promotional offers (a marketing step). Thus, appellants’ arguments have not convinced
us of error in the examiner’s rejection and we find ample evidence of record to support
the examiner’s finding that Lazarus discloses the invention as claimed.
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