Systems for Supporting Marketing Decisions

Systems to support marketing decisions may be called marketing management support systems (MMSSs), marketing decision support systems (MDSSs) or intelligent MDSSs (IMDSSs). They can assist marketing management in a range of strategic planning, tactical, and decision-making activities. This chapter provides an overview of the history of such systems and the characteristics of the problems they aim to support. It then examines different classifications of such systems, and gives some published measures of the extent of their use and the expressed levels of satisfaction with them of marketing management. The second part describes recent published research in the area. While mentioning the DSS approaches that are used, such as case-based reasoning, neural networks, analytical hierarchy process, and genetic algorithms, it summarizes the research by marketing decision areas. Many of these are classic examples such as marketing strategy, customer segmentation, product pricing, and new product development. Others incorporate the newer marketing channels such as the Internet and mobile phones, or introduce approaches such as CRM and geo-visual marketing. It has been suggested that recommender systems and customer DSSs should be an integral part of marketing management’s decision support portfolio, and these are also discussed here.