Analysis of acquisition patterns: A theoretical and empirical evaluation of alternative methods

The order in which consumers acquire nonconsumable products, such as durable and financial products, provides key information for marketing activities, for example, cross-sell lead generation. This paper advocates the desirable features of nonparametric scaling for analyzing acquisition patterns. We illustrate and evaluate applications of nonparametric scaling to a Dutch data set containing information on ownership of nine financial products by 1361 households in 2001. Results show that use of nonparametric scaling reveals acquisition patterns of financial products. Because the analyzed data set also contains information on actual acquisition dates, we can show the deduced acquisition patterns have high forecasting accuracy in terms of future acquisitions. Results can be further improved by taking into consideration market dynamics, such as changes of product positions in acquisition patterns.