Accordingly, this study investigates direct marketing and direct
selling issues in the Taiwan direct selling of cosmetics, which is
part of the direct marketing segment of direct selling. There are
two data mining stages implemented in this study. The Apriori
algorithm is a methodology that consists of the association rules
for data mining, which is implemented to mine knowledge from
a customer database. Knowledge extracted from data mining results
is illustrated as knowledge patterns and rules in order to propose
suggestions and solutions to direct selling firms for their
direct marketing design. Following that, this study uses K-means
to sort consumers into clusters and generate association rules for
each cluster. Thereby, suggestions and solutions can be proposed
to the direct marketing organization for possible new services
and sales. The rest of this study is organized as follows. In Section
2, we present the background of the direct selling industry and cosmetics
market in Taiwan. Section 3 introduces the proposed data
mining system, which includes the system framework and physical
database design. Section 4 presents the data mining process,
including the Apriori algorithm, K-means algorithm, and knowledge
extraction. Section 5 analyzes the data mining results. Research
findings and managerial implications are presented in
Sections 6 and 7 presents a brief conclusion.