Marketing Engineering: Models that Connect with Practice

Other chapters in this book have demonstrated the wide range of marketing problems and the various analytic approaches implemented in decision models to address those problems. We will elaborate on some of those applications, but our main focus here is on how to make those models relevant and useful in practice. We take the perspective that the glass is both half-full and half-empty. We will sketch the range of marketing problems that marketing decision models have addressed, or can address, and we will provide an overview of some of the most visible applications in our literature that have had measurable impact on practice. That is the glass half full. On the half-empty side, we will document the gap between realized and actual potential for those applications. We will also identify areas for fruitful work by marketing scientists (and marketing engineers), both in terms of future domains of application and mechanisms that can be employed to increase the impact of marketing decision models, using an approach we call marketing engineering.