Bayes goes to the Cinema

This paper introduces a methodology to combine relevant factors that guide the choice of cinemas’ users towards a certain type of movie, as well as to intercept the user profile for specific marketing campaigns. To this end it has been employed a Bayesian belief network that reveal to be useful for coding tacit knowledge emerging from experience. BBNs have been applied to a dataset provided by a movie distribution company that operates in multiplex cinemas throughout Italy, that collects users’ answers about their personal preferences, from various multiplexes on the national territory. Indeed, SMEs hold data with particular types of features that are not contained in general-purpose datasets but which are necessary for their specific business decisions, without being, therefore, experts in analytical or computer science subjects. Through the mediation of the Bayesian network mechanism the organisation brings together updated preferences from a collective of customers that express their tastes and, as such, contributing to a value co-creation initiative.