Database marketers typically attempt to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by targeting their best customers. Unfortunately, many database marketers are unaware that typical target methods develop a descriptive profile of their target customer - an approach that often results in less-than-successful campaigns. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the inadequacy of the descriptive approach and to demonstrate the benefits of the correct predictive profiling approach. I explain the predictive profiling approach, and then expand the approach to look-alike profiling.

{If look-alike profiling is an expansion of (correct) predictive profiling, would a look-alike model validation indicate optimistic results? Yes, or No.}