Consumer data drives Spiegel's growth: Riscon told; Spiegel's Shea calls database invaluable to its marketing, Bauer's store placements

Spiegel Pres Jack Shea, who gave the keynote address at the National Retail Federation's Riscon Show in Las Vegas, NV, maintains that his company's customer purchasing database will be the basis for future competitiveness and growth. Shea spoke of the database as more useful than demographics as a predictor of future spending and said it could be manipulated in many ways for targeted mailings and various forms of marketing and advertising. The database is updated daily and is also used by Spiegel's Eddie Bauer unit to plan expansion strategies.
LAS VEGAS -- Spiegel may be the old boy of catalog retailing, but company president Jack Shea said Spiegel is aggressively employing new technologies to keep it ahead of a [...]