Optimal advertising media allocation under fuzzy environment for a multi-product segmented market

Advertising & promotion are an integral part of our social & economic system. An advertising decision is inclined by the choice of media, media effectiveness, media budget etc. especially if the advertising is required to be done in a segmented market. However, many of the decision making problems in the real world take place in an environment in which the goals, the constraints, and the consequences of possible actions are not known precisely. These problems are more inherent in advertising as budget on advertising demands huge investments. Planning for suitable media options and then judicious allocation of the available advertising budget amongst them involves critical thinking. Fortunately, fuzzy logic helps to provide solution to situations which involves decision making under fuzzy environment. This paper presents a similar problem which involves media planning and allocation problem for advertising consumer durable products in a segmented market. The potential market consists of industrial users as well as domestic users which uses the common range of products. The inherent costs of media advertising are fuzzy in nature. In order to resolve the strategic decision making related to advertisements of these products in a segmented potential adopter market under fuzzy environment, the problem is formulated as a fuzzy multi-objective optimization problem. The objective is to determine the optimal number of advertisements to be allocated to different media so as to maximize the customer increase rate and hence advertising effectiveness subject to fuzzy advertising cost budget constraint. The funds available for investment in different media are uncertain. Fuzzy goal programming approach has been used to achieve a compromised solution. The numerical illustrates a firm manufacturing consumer durables which uses three different media such as print media (which includes various newspapers as well as