Musicland Deploys Macromedia ARIA and LikeMinds

Macromedia Inc announced that Musicland Stores Corporation, a leading specialty retailer of prerecorded home-entertainment products in the United States, will deploy Macromedia ARIA and Macromedia LikeMinds to provide a rich, personalized online customer shopping experience across four retail Web sites to foster increased brand loyalty. Macromedia ARIA and LikeMinds together provide the most comprehensive view of customer behavior by gathering the richest set of customer data and generating real-time analysis.

In addition to Musicland's Websites, the company operates 1,345 stores under the names Sam Goody, Suncoast Motion Picture Company, Media Play, and On Cue. Musicland can drill-down into Macromedia ARIA's standard reports to understand how specific Web site visitors are reacting to particular pages, content sections, advertisements or promotions. Macromedia ARIA analyzes and reports on Musicland site visitor behavior in real-time, and provides the most high-performance, scalable Website analysis solution available. ARIA provides real-time detailed reports obtained by monitoring server and network traffic to and from a Website. Musicland will also deploy all four personalization engines available for Macromedia LikeMinds, tracking purchase history, real-time clickstream, preference and product matching data, giving the company deep insight across their customer base.

Macromedia LikeMinds delivers highly accurate product recommendations, personally relevant content, and targeted promotions for each individual Web visitor. LikeMinds makes Web sites more convenient for online shoppers and builds trust in the online merchant. Macromedia LikeMinds is powered by industry-leading, patented collaborative filtering personalization technology. Using LikeMinds, Musicland can deploy a scalable personalization solution across all four of its businesses. Visitors to any Musicland site will get recommendations that pull from a vast product inventory based on shopping patterns of the millions of customers that visit Musicland stores. Musicland also plans to integrate its brick-and-mortar shopping data with its online customer data to deliver recommendations based on the richest set of data available.

"Macromedia ARIA and LikeMinds enable us to deliver a unique shopping experience to every visitor to our Website," said Steve Danker, vice president and chief information officer at Musicland. "The integration between these products gives us an opportunity not only to know our users, but also, because of that knowledge, to exponentially improve their shopping experience every time they visit our site. The products also scale to meet our expanding needs across all of our consumer brands, and sharing consumer data between our stores and Websites offer a substantial return on investment."

"We are excited to add Musicland to the growing list of organizations that will benefit from the eBusiness Infrastructure recently announced by Macromedia," said Stephen Elop, senior vice president and general manager at Macromedia. "Macromedia's personalization and analysis solutions will enable Musicland to more effectively engage its customers, improving the customers' experience and Musicland's ROI on its Internet investment."

Macromedia ARIA and LikeMinds are also key components of Macromedia's integrated solution addressing the dynamic Web content life cycle, which ranges from authoring and managing content, to engaging the customer, personalizing content, and analyzing results.

About Macromedia

Macromedia's mission is to add life to the Web. Our award-winning products empower developers to provide the most engaging experience on the Web and enable more effective e-business. Headquartered in San Francisco, Macromedia has more than 800 employees worldwide and is available on the Internet at www.macromedia.com.