Comments on "Econometric Models for Probabilistic Choice among Products."

With this and similar definitions, marketing encompasses goods such as soap, industrial products, consumer durables, health care, transportation, and even ideas. It encompasses forecasting sales, designing new products and services, communicating information to consumers, providing channels of supply and distribution, and pricing. Some marketing analyses are managerial in that they provide market intelligence to help managers achieve goals, such as improved profit, while some marketing analyses are research oriented in that they try to understand market structure or consumer behavior. Marketing tools are anything that can influence the exchange process, including the product (both the physical product and its image), advertising, promotion (price-off, coupons, sampling), price, distribution, and government policy. In one way, marketing provides the tactics to implement economic analysis, but in an equally valid way it provides the basic building blocks of economic theory: consumer behavior and the firm's response.