Towards Hyper-Relevance in Marketing: Development of a Hybrid Cold-Start Recommender System

Recommender systems position themselves as powerful tools in the support of relevance and personalization, presenting remarkable potential in the area of marketing. The cold-start customer problematic presents a challenge within this topic, leading to the need of distinguishing user features and preferences based on a restricted set of transactional information. This paper proposes a hybrid recommender system that aims to leverage transactional and portfolio information as indicating characteristics of customer behaviour. Four independent systems are combined through a parallelised weighted hybrid design. The first individual system utilises the price, target age, and brand of each product to develop a content-based recommender system, identifying item similarities. Secondly, a keyword-based content system uses product titles and descriptions to identify related groups of items. The third system utilises transactional data, defining similarity between products based on purchasing patterns, categorised as a collaborative model. The fourth system distinguishes itself from the previous approaches by leveraging association rules, using transactional information to establish antecedent and precedence relationships between items through a market basket analysis. Two datasets were analysed: product portfolio and transactional datasets. The product portfolio had 17,118 unique products and the included 4,408,825 instances from 2 June 2021 until 2 June 2022. Although the collaborative system demonstrated the best evaluation metrics when comparing all systems individually, the hybridisation of the four systems surpassed each of the individual systems in performance, with a 8.9% hit rate, 6.6% portfolio coverage, and with closer targeting of customer preferences and smaller bias.