- What is Origins?
- What does Origins do?
- What's in the Origins database?
- How is the Origins database used to generate a CEL code?
- How does the Origins software work?
- How can Origins be used by analysts, marketers and business leaders?
- Download a copy of the Origins brochure
- Download a copy of this factsheet
- Customer Profiling
- Individual Targeting
- Geographic Targeting
Origins Factsheet
What is Origins?
Origins is a segmentation tool that classifies names on a database according to their most likely cultural and ancestral origins. Each name is allocated to one of 243 different Origins types, based on an evaluation of the personal and family name components.
Origins identifies individuals whose ancestry is most likely to be, for example, from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, China or Vietnam - or from many other parts of the world. Origins also suggests a customer's most likely language and religion.
For the first time, Origins makes it possible for Australian organisations of any size to gain insight into the cultural background of their customers.
What does Origins do?
Origins takes a customer's personal name and family name and matches those names to its comprehensive internal databases.
Origins separately evaluates the personal name and the family name. It then makes a balanced assessment of the name combination and appends the most likely cultural, ethnic, and linguistic (CEL) code to the record.
There are 243 different CEL codes reflecting the world’s most distinctive cultural identities. For convenience, these detailed codes are grouped into 16 standard broad cultural groupings as follows:
| Sample of 243 Origins Types | Origins Group | |
|---|---|---|
| BANGLADESH MUSLIM | AFRICAN | |
| CHINESE CANTONESE | ANGLO-SAXON | |
| ENGLAND | CELTIC | |
| ENGLAND : CORNWALL | EAST/SOUTHEAST ASIAN | |
| INDIA PUNJABI | GREEK/GREEK CYPRIOT | |
| INDIA SIKH | HISPANIC | |
| ITALY : FRIULI-VENEZIA GIULIA | ITALIAN | |
| LAOS | JEWISH/ARMENIAN | |
| MUSLIM INDIA | MUSLIM | |
| SAMOA | NORDIC | |
| SCOTLAND | NOT FOUND | |
| SERBIA | OCEANIA | |
| SPAIN : CASTILLE | SLAVIC | |
| TURKEY | SOUTH ASIAN | |
| UKRAINE | UNCLASSIFIED | |
| VIETNAM | WESTERN EUROPEAN |
What's in the Origins database?
Data has been sourced from a variety of near-universal files of personal and family names for each of the following markets:
| - United Kingdom | - Japan |
| - United States | - India |
| - Ireland | - France |
| - Australia | - Spain |
| - Germany | - Italy |
| - New Zealand | - Romania |
| - Norway | - Sweden |
| - Denmark | - Netherlands |
These files have been aggregated into a database of over 700 million individual name combinations.
In addition, name data has been gathered from all other major regions of the world - South and South-East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, North and South America, and China - to ensure global representation of naming conventions.
From this data, OriginsInfo has compiled two databases containing 1,280,000 different family names, and 480,000 different personal names.
The database has been linked to the results of many years of genealogical, ancestral, and local history research into the meaning and origin of names. From this resource, users regularly classify more than 99 percent of customers to their most likely ancestral origin.
How is the Origins database used to generate a CEL code?
Using the research basis, analysis establishes a confidence level reflecting the strength of each name's association with a particular Origins CEL type.
A separate assessment of the CEL code associated with the personal name, and the CEL code associated with the family name produces an arbitrated assessment and a confidence score of the most likely cultural connection.
Business rules are also applied where a name appears in more than one cultural type - eg the personal names of Michael, David, Maria and Anna occur in multiple societies and are therefore less indicative of cultural origin, although their incidence will be higher in some cultures than others. Overall, family names are much stronger indicators of cultural origin.
How does the Origins software work?
The Origins application runs on standard platforms running any version of Microsoft Windows since Windows98. It is a stand-alone application but, if required, Origins can be embedded within an existing database environment, using API documentation available from OriginsInfo.
Updates of the software and databases are released regularly and supplied by email, by physical delivery of recorded media or, if preferred, through a simple automated internet update process. All updates are free to licensed users.
How can Origins be used by analysts, marketers and business leaders?
The results produced by Origins are generally used in three different ways:
Origins is used to understand the overall cultural composition of your customer list. By comparing to an appropriate base file reflecting the market from which your customers are drawn, you can profile your customers. An example of a Customer Profile follows:
| Origins Group | Percent in File | Percent in Market | Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| ANGLO-SAXON | 33.7% | 37.5% | 90 |
| CELTIC | 14.5% | 16.1% | 90 |
| EAST/SOUTH EAST ASIAN | 10.4% | 5.8% | 179 |
| MUSLIM | 9.0% | 5.2% | 174 |
| ITALIAN | 8.2% | 13.5% | 61 |
| SLAVIC | 7.1% | 7.8% | 91 |
| WESTERN EUROPEAN | 5.0% | 4.6% | 109 |
| HISPANIC | 3.5% | 2.5% | 143 |
| SOUTH ASIAN | 2.9% | 0.7% | 396 |
| GREEK/GREEK CYPRIOT | 2.7% | 4.9% | 56 |
| NORDIC | 1.0% | 0.9% | 107 |
| AFRICAN | 0.8% | 0.1% | 527 |
| JEWISH/ARMENIAN | 0.5% | 0.3% | 156 |
| NOT FOUND | 0.3% | 0.1% | 596 |
| OCEANIA | 0.3% | 0.1% | 310 |
| UNCLASSIFIED | 0.1% | 0.0% | 157 |
By profiling customers, you can identify which groups are under or over-represented in your customer file. You can find out which groups prefer to use which products, services, channels and outlets, which ones you are good or poor at retaining, or which ones are responsive to particular types of promotion or reward.
Origins is used to code individual customers. You may want to target campaigns to members of specific cultural groups to improve awareness and take up of public services, such as health screening or education courses. Or you may want to target products, such as cosmetics, food, media channels, and travel, to the audiences for which they are well suited. The codes can also be used as a pre-screening indicator to flag likelihood of fraud, or criminal activity.
Origins is used to classify areas. You can identify the locations, right down to street level, where individual cultural communities have most strongly established themselves. This may support area-based targeted communications, or suggest potential sites for retail outlets.
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