Relationship between Product Based Loyalty 
	and Clustering based on Supermarket Visit 
		and Spending Patterns

Chad West, Stephanie MacDonald, Pawan Lingras, and Greg Adams 

Abstract. Loyalty of customers to a supermarket can be measured in a variety of
ways.  If a customer tends to buy from certain categories of products, it is 
likely that the customer is loyal to the supermarket. Another indication of 
loyalty is based on the tendency of customers to visit the supermarket over a 
number of weeks. Regular visitors and spenders are more likely to be loyal to 
the supermarket. Neither one of these two criteria can provide a complete 
picture of customers’ loyalty. The decision regarding the loyalty of a customer 
will have to take into account the visiting pattern as well as the categories 
of products purchased. This paper describes results of experiments that 
attempted to identify customer loyalty using these two sets of criteria 
separately. The experiments were based on transactional data obtained from a 
supermarket data collection program. Comparisons of results from these parallel 
sets of experiments were useful in fine tuning both the schemes of estimating 
the degree of a customer’s loyalty. The project also provides useful insights 
for the development of a theoretical framework for studying customer loyalty 
based on more sophisticated measures. It is hoped that the understanding of 
loyal customers will be helpful in identifying better marketing strategies.