In this section I will ground some expectations. For most problems, a pattern is some set of measurable characteristics that can be correlated with some other characteristic. What this pattern doesn't say is everyone matching this pattern must drive an expensive car. If you are trying to market luxury products, this sort of pattern might very well be interesting. But if you are trying to predict medical insurance fraud, this pattern is unlikely to be useful, and therefore uninteresting.
Coverage is also an important concept.
In the previous example, the discovered pattern only applies to some fraction of people living in one zip code. If your business is national, a pattern that includes only one zip code is not enough. In that case the database marketing system would need to discover many more patterns. Coverage relates the total number of possible pattern matches to the number of records that do match some pattern for a desired characteristic. If a collection of patterns match all records with the desired characteristic, the coverage is one hundred percent.