What is Origins?

Origins is a segmentation system which classifies consumers according to the part of the world from which their forebears are most likely to have originated.

Each consumer on a customer file can be placed into one of 200 different ‘Origins’ types on the basis of their personal and family names.  The segmentation could be used for example to identify people on a customer file whose ancestry is most likely to be from Ireland, Italy, Albania or Myanmar.

Origins uses the same information to code customers on the basis of their most likely language and religion.   An age estimate and gender can also be appended for most customers.

How is Origins used?

Origins is used in three different ways:

1 : Origins is used to profile customers and customer segments.  By profiling customers you can identify which groups are under or over-represented on your customer file.  You can find out which groups prefer to use which products, channels and outlets, which ones you are good or poor at retaining and which are responsive to which types of promotion or reward.

2 : Origins is used to code customers.  By coding customers you can target campaigns to improve awareness and take up of public services by members of specific minority groups.  You can also target products, such as cosmetics, media channels and travel, at audiences for whom they have been especially developed.

3 : Origins is used to classify postcodes.  Using a table which identifies the dominant Origins type in each postcode you can identify the locations in which individual communities have established themselves right down to street level.

Who uses Origins?

Origins has both government and commercial sector use.  Government organisations that use Origins to inform the planning of their services to minority groups include Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Healthcare Trusts and individual Hospital Trusts.  Origins has also been used by the police and by the campaign departments of political parties.

It has been used by retailers to identify the minority groups that use their services and to identify heavy users and users of particular products.  Origins has also been used in the charity sector to identify the representativeness of members and donors.

How does Origins work?

In order to code individual customers, Origins makes use of a table which contains information on over 200,000 personal names and over 600,000 family names.  Each of these names has been examined in such a way as to identify the Origins type to which it is most likely to belong.  This evaluation makes use of a number of criteria including the Origins codes of the surnames held by bearers of each personal name, and vice versa; the geographical concentration of the name both within and between countries; the Mosaic codes in which the names are mostly found ; and the appearance of diagnostic letter sequences.

This evaluation also establishes the confidence with which we can say a particular name belongs to a particular Origins type.

Looking at the codes associated with both the personal name and the family name,  and taking into account the confidence level of each, Origins identifies the Origins type to which each customer name is most likely to belong.

What is Origins coverage rate?

Provide you files free of data capture errors, you should be able to code 99.5% of your customer records by Origins type.  The residue are either names which the system does not recognise, because they are rare, or ones which the system can not allocate to any particular Origins type.

What is Origins level of accuracy?

The level of accuracy varies from one Origins type to another.   Origins achieves accuracy rates oin excess of 90% in identifying South Asians and Muslims, and 70% in identifying  Black Africans, Greeks, Armenians and people from East and South East Europe.  It achieves accuracy rates of 50% with Hispanics.  Lower accuracy rates are achieved with people of Nordic or French origin, with Jews and Black Caribbeans.

As would be expected the system is more accurate when coding names to a general categories, such as South Asians or Greeks or Greek Cypriots, than to specific sub-categories, such as Sri Lankans or Greek Cypriots.

How does Origins handle persons of mixed ancestry?

Origins can be used to identify persons whose names come from more than one tradition – for example a person with an English personal name and a Finnish family name.

The confidence score given to each name combination can also be used to select or deselect people who are most likely to be of mixed ancestry.  Restricting a communication to names with high confidence scores is an effective way of avoiding communicating with individuals who are least likely to belong to the selected target group.

Profiling using Origins

When Origins is used to profile customer files it is possible to specify as one’s base comparison any region, postcode area, police, education or health area in Great Britain.

Using Origins abroad

Although Origins is a single application, it has facilities hereby it can be optimised for specific overseas markets.  These overseas versions code certain names differently in different markets.  For example a ‘Roger’, which would be coded as ‘English’ in Britain, would be coded ‘French’ in France.  Non GB versions of Origins also allow the mix of names by Origins type to be compared with the Origins mix for the specific market in which the analysis is undertaken.

How is Origins accessed?

Origins types and groups can be appended to customer records using the Origins software application.  This system is licenced to clients by Experian.  The application is downloadable from the internet and makes use of files which themselves are updated on a regular basis as names from more countries are introduced.  The licence fee depends upon the version of the application licenced.  For example it is possible to licence a standard GB version designed to code names appearing on British or Irish customer lists.  An enhanced version also appends age and gender.  Alternatively users can licence versions of Origins optimised for different overseas markets.

If they prefer users can have the codes appended to their files by Experian on a bureau basis.

The Origins postcode classification is typically accessed via Experian's Micromarketer Generation 3 geographcal analysis software.