When trying to manage a population of customers in a high frequency-of-purchase business where unique customer data are obtainable, it can be helpful to look at a grid comparing:

Frequency of purchase in the last "active" 30 day period, and;

Last purchase date.

This grid will look like this, when the report is run against the current state of customers:

Another way to look at these dimensions is as continuous dimensions where:

Freq of Purchase {0-->∞}

Last Purchase {0-->∞}

And each customer is plotted along these dimensions.

But, to make things convenient, we cut off "last purchase", at, say, 90 days, and frequency at, say, 4 X for our table. We can then bucketize these scalar dimensions into a neat 4X4 (or nXn) grid like the one above.

A simple customer count in each bucket lets one understand current state. This is a perfect application for an OLAP reporting tool.…