Elsevier < Decision Sciences Publications < Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science < Volume 5: Marketing < Preface

MARKETING
Edited by J. Eliashberg and G.L. Lilien

PREFACE

The battle for markets is intensifying in these days of increasing competition. Where it was once sufficient to produce a superior product and price it attractively, developing a 'competitive advantage', finding a 'market niche', and harvesting the rewards for those advantages are increasingly problematic for marketing management.

In much the same way that the OR/MS approach developed and was brought to bear on the operational problems that demanded improved solutions during and after World War 11, the past several decades of marketing warfare have spawned an exciting crop of OR/MS approaches to marketing problems.

In this book we have brought together an outstanding set of marketing scholars, each of whom has provided a state-of-the-art review of his or her area of expertise. The book is intended for the OR/MS audience, that is, a mathematically literate group, but without significant knowledge of the domain of marketing.

The first chapter of the book provides a more comprehensive overview of the field and the motivation for using the OR/MS approach to marketing problems. There are four other parts to the book, organized as follows:

Part II, Models of Market Phenomena, deals with three key building blocks of marketing models: models of individual consumer behavior, models of the behavior of groups (as in family decision-making, negotiations and organizational buying) and models of competition (interactions between competitors in a marketplace). An understanding of the phenomena introduced in this part provides an essential foundation for many marketing decisions.

Part III, Tools and Methods for Market Analysis, supplements the standard OR/MS toolkit with key pieces of technology and methodology that have been developed to address key marketing problems. The chapters in this section cover methods to understand and analyze the structure of markets, market-share models, models to forecast the ultimate sales of new products (packaged goods, primarily) prior to launch, diffusion models (focusing on the dynamics and control of new product sales) and econometric/time-series market response models.

Part IV, Elements of the Marketing Mix, addresses the individual controls that the marketer has, and deals with them one element at a time. Chapters in this section cover product design, pricing, sales promotion, salesforce compensation and salesforce management.

Part V, Interaction, Strategy and Synergy, links earlier developments. The chapters in this section deal with marketing-mix models, systems to support marketing decisions (reviewing expert systems in the same vein as Marketing.

Decision Support Systems), models of marketing strategy and, finally, models of joint marketing and production decision-making.

Each of the chapters was submitted to at least two referees. Many of the authors here provided referee reports for other chapters; the referees not among the list of authors include:

• Gregory S. Carpenter, Northwestern University
• Kalyan Chatterjee, Perm State University
• David P. Christy, Perm State University
• Morris A. Cohen, University of Pennsylvania
• Timothy Devinney, Vanderbilt University
• Stéphane Gauvin, Universit6 Laval, Québec
• Donna L. Hoffinan, University of Texas at Dallas
• Dipak Jain, Northwestern University
• Shlomo Kalish, Tel Aviv University
• Uday S. Karmarkar, University of Rochester
• Rajiv Lal, Stanford University
• John D.C. Little, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Leonard M. Lodish, University of Pennsylvania
• John M. McCann, Duke University
• Robert J. Meyer, University Of Pennsylvania
• Chakravarthi Narasirnhan, Washington University at St. Louis
• Jagmohan S. Raju, University of Pennsylvania
• David C. Schmittlein, University of Pennsylvania
• Subrata K. Sen, Yale School of Management
• Alan D. Shocker, University of Minnesota
• Joe Urbany, University of South Carolina
• Piet Vanden Abeele, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
• Wilfried R. Vanhonacker, INSEAD, France
• Berend Wierenga, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
  

We join with the authors in offering our thanks to all the referees; the material here is both better and richer following their comments and recommendations.

There are a number of topics not covered here. Some did not satisfy the referees. Others were promised, and, sadly, did not appear in written form in time for us to go to press. What is here, while not exhaustive, does cover the majority of major OR/MS work in marketing.

We would like to thank the authors for their contributions and for humoring us when we told each of them that their manuscript of the 'one missing and holding up production'. We offer special thanks to Mary Wyckoff who, in addition to helping assemble and coordinate the production of this book, acted as the 'bad cop' (to our 'good cop') when trying to extract material from our more tardy contributors. Without her efforts we would still be waiting for that last manuscript that was 'in typing'.

Jehoshua Eliashberg / Gary L. Lilien

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