Analyzing
Marketing(^116) Opportunities
marketing researcher’s report may seem abstract, complicated, and tentative. Yet
in the more progressive companies, marketing researchers are increasingly being
included as members of the product management team, and their influence on
marketing strategy is growing.
ARKETING DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM
A growing number of organizations are using a marketing decision support system to
help their marketing managers make better decisions. Little defines an MDSS as follows:
■ Amarketing decision support system (MDSS)is a coordinated collec-
tion of data, systems, tools, and techniques with supporting software and
hardware by which an organization gathers and interprets relevant informa-
tion from business and environment and turns it into a basis for marketing
action.^22
Table 1.6 describes the major statistical tools, models, and optimization routines
that comprise a modern MDSS. Lilien and Rangaswamy recently published Marketing
Engineering: Computer-Assisted Marketing Analysis and Planning,which provides a pack-
age of widely used modeling software tools.^23
The April 13, 1998, issue of Marketing Newslists over 100 current marketing and
sales software programs that assist in designing marketing research studies, segment-
ing markets, setting prices and advertising budgets, analyzing media, and planning
sales force activity. Here are examples of decision models that have been used by mar-
keting managers:
BRANDAID: A flexible marketing-mix model focused on consumer packaged goods
whose elements are a manufacturer, competitors, retailers, consumers, and the gen-
eral environment. The model contains submodels for advertising, pricing, and com-
petition. The model is calibrated with a creative blending of judgment, historical
analysis, tracking, field experimentation, and adaptive control.^24
CALLPLAN: A model to help salespeople determine the number of calls to make per
period to each prospect and current client. The model takes into account travel
time as well as selling time. The model was tested at United Airlines with an ex-
perimental group that managed to increase its sales over a matched control group
by 8 percentage points.^25
DETAILER: A model to help salespeople determine which customers to call on and
which products to represent on each call. This model was largely developed for
pharmaceutical detail people calling on physicians where they could represent no
more than three products on a call. In two applications, the model yielded strong
profit improvements.^26
GEOLINE: A model for designing sales and service territories that satisfies three prin-
ciples: the territories equalize sales workloads; each territory consists of adjacent
areas; and the territories are compact. Several successful applications were re-
ported.^27
MEDIAC: A model to help an advertiser buy media for a year. The media planning
model includes market-segment delineation, sales potential estimation, diminish-
ing marginal returns, forgetting, timing issues, and competitor media schedules.^28
Some models now claim to duplicate the way expert marketers normally make
their decisions. Some recent expert system models include:
PROMOTER evaluates sales promotions by determining baseline sales (what sales
would have been without promotion) and measuring the increase over baseline as-
sociated with the promotion.^29
ADCAD recommends the type of ad (humorous, slice of life, and so on) to use given the
marketing goals, product characteristics, target market, and competitive situation.^30
M