Capital One just can’t do enough market tests. Indeed, it conducted 80,000 of them in 2003 – on everything from marketing copy to price points to credit lines. The company, which posted revenue of more than $9.8 billion and net income of more than $1.1 billion last year, relies on this extraordinary diligence to ensure it is effectively gauging customer priorities and preferences.

The company claims it differentiates its marketing operations on three dimensions: 1) state-of-the-art technology; 2) rigorous testing and analysis of products, segments and consumer behaviors; and 3) flexible operations and services that enable the organization to capitalize on the intelligence it generates and pursue new opportunities.

“As a statistician, I love this because it gives us the rigor of testing appropriately and doing predictive modeling [to ensure success] going forward," said Dave Jeppesen, VP of Capital One's Direct Marketing Center in a recent keynote speech at the National Center for Direct Marketing winter conference in Orlando. "We are going after the holy grail of direct marketing -- to get the right product on the right terms to the right customer at the right time through the right channel. We believe we are pretty far along."

One sophisticated, data-driven campaign enabled the company recently to determine it was sensible to increase customer credit lines and offer an extremely low fixed rate (4.99 percent) on a new card. "We saw $3 billion come onto our books because of one offer in one quarter," says Jeppesen. "It was because of the insight we found through use of our technology."