Craig Tomarkin, President and Founder Printer friendly version Background After graduating from the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in 1990, Craig joined InterData (a privately held spin-off of DMB&B's direct marketing group), where he immediately became a key member of the GM Card launch team. His sophisticated financial models were used to establish the expected business case and allowed them to play what-if scenarios on pricing, product configuration, and rewards payments. In the first year of business, the program booked five million accounts, the most successful launch of its kind. After the launch, the U.S. model was updated to include program data and drove decision making for ten years, including the decisions to: Discontinue the partner program Eliminate the gold card product Shift to a new tiered rewards program Other career highlights include: Inventing the Dart Recommendation Engine, a propietry system for making product recommendations based on transactions and user preference data. Its selections can be fine tuned to promote items based on price, availability, and other factors. See how it works: DVD Demo has movies, TV shows and live performances. The Coffee Demo features an integrated brand map and shows how even new shoppers can influence recommendations. Unique product perceptual mapping of Gevalia's coffees. Brands clustered into Flavored, Roasts, and Exotic. When price was later added as a factor, the more expensive coffees moved up the exoticness scale. This had implictions for pricing strategy, new product positioning, and upselling the right products to the right people. Improving Hachette Filipacchi's magazine renewals using regression models combined with an innovative mail strategy. Titles modeled include: Woman's Day, Home, Road & Track and others. Founded Baseballguru.com in 1998, a popular baseball web site. Craig has also done analysis and primary research for other clients such as GM's automotive divisions, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DaimlerChrysler Card, Safe-Card, Comcast, Prodigy Internet, Kraft Foods, and Gevallia Kaffe. He lives in Fairfield, CT with his wife Michelle and two children, Rachel and Rebecca.