مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری در صنعت آرایش مو : استفاده از تکنیک های داده کاوی

With the increase of living standards and the sustainable changing patterns of people’s lives, nowadays, hairdressing services have been widely used by people. This paper adopts data mining techniques by combining self-organizing maps (SOM) and K-means methods to apply in RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) model for a hair salon in Taiwan to segment customers and develop marketing strategies. The data mining techniques help identify four types of customers in this case, including loyal customers, potential customers, new customers and lost customers and develop unique marketing strategies for the four types of customers.

With increasing living standards and the sustainable changing patterns of people’s lives, people, particularly for the women, spend more on improving their beauty so as to fulfill successfully their roles in various socioeconomic categories. Hairdressing is a common way for people to present a well-groomed face to the world (Kéïta et al., 2005), which mostly refers to the following services-haircuts, hairstyles, hair perming, hair color, hair care and scalp massages (Gerson, 1999). According to the Economist (2003), Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education. The global beauty industry is growing at up to 7% a year, more than twice the rate of the developed world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Among all beauty products, the hair-related products are the most usual ones for people to use. Brown and Beale (2008) also indicate that hair-related products comprise the majority of the product amount in the global beauty industry and the hairdressing industry has multi-billion dollar impact on the American economy. In the same vain, Central Statistical Office (1995) points out that people in the UK spend over £2 billion annually on hairdressing services, which almost doubles what it pays annually for dental, medical, nursing and optical fees. Based on the survey made by Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, Taiwan, until May 2010, the national employment for the service industries comprises approximately 60% of the total national employment. In 2009, the service sector’s contribution in GDP is composed of 44% of GDP in all industries. At present, in Taiwan, the hairdressing industry is one of the popular service industries for the women when choosing their occupations. Hairdressers must receive the basic hairdressing certificate and can earn higher wage than ever before. Contrary to the traditional values for the hairdressing industry, the hairdressing industry is not a low-skilled and low-waged industry anymore. The hairdressing industry has become a highly competitive industry in developed and developing economies, showing that the hairdressing industry has significant impact on the economy in developed and developing countries (Brookes and Smith, 2009 and Picot-Lemasson et al., 2001). There is no exception to Taiwan. Particularly, an aging population in Taiwan is growing rapidly now. People with higher age demand more frequently to change their hair styles and increase more services to disguise their graying hair. Hence, the importance of the hairdressing industry in Taiwan is increasingly growing. Taiwanese hairdressing industry has the urgent need to identify profitable customers and retain loss customers so as to effectively market the services (Wang, 2010). Despite of the above and a plenty of management studies examining marketing strategies for the service industries (Beckett, 2000 and Rafalski, 2002), prior literature rarely investigates how the customer relationship management (CRM) is implemented in the hairdressing industry and thus there is little known about the marketing strategies of the hairdressing industry. Investigating customer behavior facilitates hair salons to make marketing strategies according to particular demand of customers for the services (Brown & Beale, 2008). Hence, it is vital to provide examinations on how hair salons target valuable customers and make marketing strategies for different types of customers by observing customer behaviors to segment customers. For example, by observing customer behaviors, when finding that particular customers visiting a certain hair salon more frequently and more recently whereas spending less than others would expect more to cope with their dry hair, the hair salon can make particular marketing strategies for the customers such as providing the newest promotional activities and recommending preferential products that can effectively improve their hair health so as to increase their consumption in the hair salon. Nowadays, the ability to generate useful information from data is an important issue for the industrial managers, showing the necessary for industrial mangers to use data mining (DM) techniques to find the hidden and unknown customer information from the abundant customer data and thus achieve effective CRM (Lee and Siau, 2001 and Ranjan and Bhatnagar, 2011). It is common for the service industries to utilize information technology such as building CRM information system or applying DM techniques to systematically analyze customer profiles to segment customers and target valuable customers. When service providers understand customer preference, they can develop adequate marketing strategies for customers and thus can meet their demand, enhance their satisfaction for the services and increase their willingness to purchase (Deal and Edgett, 1997, Fu et al., 2011, Kim, 2011 and Min, 2006). Based on the above, this paper adopts DM techniques – combining the self-organizing map (SOM) and K-means methods along with the application of RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) model to examine a hair salon in Taiwan to effectively identify its valuable customers and develop its marketing strategies. RFM model has been extensively applied in direct marketing to systematically examine existing customer data to analyze their consumption habits, which benefits marketers to identify profitable customers in an effective way and develop adequate marketing strategies and helps marketers to seek ways to retain lost customers (Lumsden et al., 2008 and Wei et al., 2010). The SOM method and K-means method have been widely used to segment customers when using RFM model (Hanafizadeh and Mirzazadeh, 2011 and Huang et al., 2009). Hair salons can know well the linkage between customer characteristics and customer purchasing habits via adopting the DM techniques to systematically examine customer purchasing history and expenditure records and thus they can effectively allocate the resource to customers and make marketing decisions. The remainder of the paper is as follows. Section 2 provides the literature review on CRM and DM techniques used in this paper. Section 3 reports the methodology used to conduct this study. Section 4 presents the empirical results. Finally, conclusions, managerial implications, limitations and further research are depicted.

The hairdressing industry has played an increasingly important role in the service industries. Nowadays, it has become a large, attractive industry (the Economist, 2003; Brown and Beale, 2008 and Kéïta et al., 2005). However, little research examines the marketing strategies of hairdressing industry, revealing a need for further understanding. DM techniques help to uncover the hidden and unknown information from abundant data (Ranjan & Bhatnagar, 2011), which have been extensively applied in service marketing and effectively helps identify and understand customer preference and further meet customer demand. This paper adopts RFM model by applying a two-stage clustering method suggested by prior literature (Abidi and Ong, 2000, Chiu et al., 2009 and Vesanto and Alhoniemi, 2000) by combining SOM and K-means techniques to systematically analyze customer profiling for a hair salon in Taiwan. The examination on customer profiling via RFM model assists the hair salon to know the preference and the purchasing habits for different types of customers and thus assists the hair salon to make particular marketing strategy for a particular type of customers. In this paper, eleven clusters are formed by SOM technique and then adopted by K-means technique to apply in RFM model. The analysis results of RFM model indicate that the customers in the hair salon can be grouped into four types of customers, i.e., loyal customers, potential customers, new customers and lost customers. Marketing strategies for the hair salon are suggested in accordance with the four types of customers in this paper. Management literature asserts that shaping customers perceptions of services is vital, showing that the overall image created by the service providers can significantly influence service quality and further influence customers’ choices of the service providers (Ince and Bowen, 2011 and Xiao and Nicholson, 2011). For loyal customers in the hair salon, it is critical to provide highly customized services, build the transactions record system, periodically follow the customer expenditure trend and send the newest product information via personal telephone or e-mail to achieve good customer relationship. In addition, providing free trials for particular products is also an essential way to give feedbacks to the customers. On the other hand, since this type of customers prefer to make hair cleaning, hair health and hair shining, the hair salon can actively select nourishing conditioner and shampoo with purifying scalp and oily scalp for the customers. Moreover, the hair salon can provide free consultations for hair care and scalp problems such as pruritus, dandruff and alopecia. The major marketing strategies for potential customers are to provide them the news about recent promotional activities and special services for hair treatment. Examining customer transactions data to know customer purchasing behavior facilitates the hair salon to adopt a cross selling strategy, to know which products suitable to be recommended and to be given preferential prices to the customers. Furthermore, the hair salon can also provide gifts or discount with the purchase of a target amount, via the above marketing methods, the hair salon can motivate the customers to enhance their purchasing amounts and thus increase the profitability. On the other hand, the potential customers highlight shampoos-oily scalp, nourishing conditioners and essence serum, suggesting that the hair salon can encourage customers to increase the use of the following services, including hair cleaning, deep hair repair treatments and the products that can prevent from dry hair, so as to help customers improve scalp health and enhance deep hair treatment. In order to increase the purchasing amount of new customers, the hair salon can adopt promotional channels such as certificate and interest-free installment. Besides, the hair salon can also develop a closer and longer relationship with the customers via such as providing a more comfortable service environment to keep the customers stay longer. Furthermore, to provide a free parking and free hair consultations might also be the suggested strategy to strengthen the interaction of the hair salon with the customers. This type of customers prefers to change hair color, use nourishing conditions and keep particular hairstyles via paste. Hence, the hair salon can also offer the customers vegetable hair color, hair treatment for dry hair and paste that help maintain natural and long-term effect. The lost customers in the hair salon are customers needed to be retained by the hair salon. For this type of customers, the hair salon can adopt convenient and cheap marketing channels such as sending the e-paper and mobile phone text messages about the promotional news and providing economy products to attract the customers. To make advertisement is also a feasible way to convey the image of the hair salon and a crucial factor to influence the customers’ decisions about whether to stay in the hair salon since the quality of hairdressing services only can be assessed during and after the purchase of the services. As this type of customers often purchase particular products for hair care and hairstyles, the hair salon can provide the customers economy, good-quality and healthy hair spray and curling lotion and the services for treatment of damaged hair. The DM techniques in this paper help systematically examine customers profile and segment customer types and thus facilitate to develop unique marketing strategies for each type of customers in the hair salon. This benefits the hair salon to effectively target valuable customers and implement differential marketing strategies. This paper only includes particular customer data and may thus provide limited marketing implications to managers. Liston-Heyes and Neokleous (2000) document that gender-based pricing exists in the hairdressing industry, suggesting that investigating customer demographic characteristic may provide different marketing implications. Hence, examining customer demographic characteristics or their real perceptions about hair care and hair styling, information such as the age, the gender, the education background, the occupation, waiting time of services, hair treatment and modern styling equipments might be needed for the hair salon to improve its overall services.