Marketing Decision Making and Decision Support

Marketing Decision Making and Decision Support addresses the topic of marketing management support systems (MMSS), which are computer-enabled devices that help marketers to make better decisions. Marketing management support systems enhance the decision making capabilities of marketers, by improving their efficiency and their effectiveness. A marketing management support system can perform different roles. It can act as a data repository, which is a device that monitors events and provides information about these events to decision makers in such a way that they can easily use it. A more sophisticated MMSS can help detecting cause-effect relationships between events in the market place.

An even more sophisticated MMSS can consider alternative marketing actions and predict the outcomes of these actions. Finally, an MMSS reaches the highest level of sophistication and functionality when it answers the ""what should happen?"" questions like ""Should we introduce this new product?"" or ""Should we increase our advertising budget with 50% in order to realize our profit target?"". Relative to other management areas such as finance and operations management, marketing is a domain where human experience and expertise have always played an important role. Many marketing processes are weakly structured and require a good deal of human judgment.

The authors discuss in detail how the combination of the marketing decision maker and MMSS improves the performance of marketing decision makers.