Coherent Path Patents New System for Optimizing Customer Purchase Trajectories

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coherent Path announced today that CTO and cofounder Greg Leibon has obtained a patent for a revolutionary mathematical infrastructure.

The patent for invention number US 10,269,928 B1 protects a core component of Coherent Path’s proprietary technology: a “hyperbolic geometry” that can be used to map each customer’s unique journey through a product space, and guide customers toward product discoveries that deliver greater lifetime value for brands and customers alike.

“Discovery is such a crucial part of a great shopping experience,” says Leibon. “But traditionally, machine-learning algorithms — while they’re good at reinforcing what we already like — haven’t been great helping us discover new products we’ll love. That’s the problem we set out to solve with this geometrical approach.”

Whereas many current product-recommendation systems simply reinforce known customer behavior by recommending products similar to those customers have already purchased, Coherent Path’s new geometrical modeling system provides a way for machines to help customers discover their next favorite products, through recommendations that organically shape themselves around each shopper’s evolving tastes.

Coherent Path’s new system achieves this by integrating customer data from many sources into a mathematical “canvas” of logical paths from one area of a brand’s product catalog to another. This is crucial for driving business objectives via marketing tactics that feel natural to each customer — for example, by featuring creative assets most closely related to that customer’s emerging aspirations, and by avoiding content that’s unlikely to generate click-throughs from that particular shopper.

Machine-learning algorithms can then use this multi-dimensional canvas to generate marketing campaigns that organically guide customers toward higher-value product categories. Plus, as an algorithm learns from customer interactions, it can feed new data back into the mathematical model in real time, re-optimizing the entire canvas of possible journeys — which enables the marketing algorithm, in turn, to generate adaptable “email diets” that develop in tandem with each customer’s tastes and aspirations.

Retailers who have plugged their existing marketing tools into Coherent Path’s system have already realized dramatic results — including revenue lifts of more than 28 percent, and order lifts of more than 30 percent, over the course of just a single campaign.

“But the potential of this technology goes way beyond just optimizing margins in a single marketing campaign,” Leibon explains. “Our system enables machine-learning algorithms to keep pace with the ‘moving targets’ of each shopper’s tastes — by asking questions, reshaping recommendations, and building relationships of trust that benefit customers and retailers over the long term.”

To learn more, watch how Coherent Path constructs unique personalized journeys for every subscriber and request an invite to an upcoming Peer Forum where you’ll hear about Greg Leibon’s latest research on how to reduce email promotions.