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| Industry Links |
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| Glossary |
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| Analytics: Sophisticated data analysis and modeling, including developing customer profiles, determining customer and merchandise price profitability, database and other in-depth analyses. |
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| Back-end Process: The set of processes which occur after a mailing, such as tracking data to create histories, determining trends and analyzying performance. |
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| Benchmarks: Standards (industry, company, other) against which performance is measured. |
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| Business Rules: A set of standard practices to be applied consistently to ensure comparability across multiple mailings or activities. |
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| Consortium Database: A mega-database comprising the files of many companies who have joined together to share names, benchmarks or performance data, generally anonymously. Often called "co-op" databases. |
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| Crazy cat person: A person, usually a circulation manager or director, who is so mired in data, due to a proliferation of source codes, that s/he has no way to navigate out of this situation and feels like the only hope is to create a new piece of information, which only adds to the confusion. |
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| Free Willy: Talking off point or off the script, particularly in a presentation when maintaining focus is important. |
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| Front-End Processes: The set of processes which are implemented prior to a mailing, such as list selection, mail date planning and testing schedules. |
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| Hail Mary Pass: A last ditch effort to create a budget to save one’s job, even though there is little or no chance of success. |
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| Lifetime Value Analysis: Projected profitability of a given customer over a given period of time, primarily to evaluate customer acquisition costs. |
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| Merchandise/Square Inch Analysis: Actual profitability of specific merchandise, categories, pages or square inches in a given catalog. |
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| Regression Analysis: A method of determining relationships among different data in order to predict future behavior/results. |
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| ROI: Return on investment is an analysis to determine the profitability of a given investment/expenditure. Also a way to determine whether or not a project should be undertaken. |
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| Vendorship: The practice of using an outsourced resource because of a prior relationship rather than the value or core competence of the vendor's service. |
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| Vendor Summit: A gathering of all vendors who provide services to a given body of clients. |
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| Violence: Interactions with an unwanted outside resource/consultant that are usually marked by a palpable lack of cooperation |
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