The development of a hybrid intelligent system for developing marketing strategy

In this paper, the development of a hybrid intelligent system for developing marketing strategy is described. The hybrid system has been developed to: provide a logical process for strategic analysis; support group assessment of strategic marketing factors; help the coupling of strategic analysis with managerial intuition and judgement; help managers deal with uncertainty and fuzziness; and produce intelligent advice on setting marketing strategy. In this system, the strengths of expert Ž . systems, fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks ANNs are combined to support the process of marketing strategy Ž . development. Moreover, the advantages of Porter’s five forces model and the directional policy matrices DPM are also integrated to assist strategic analysis. In the paper, the software architecture of the hybrid system is discussed in details. Particularly, the group assessment support module, the fuzzification of strategic factors, and the fuzzy reasoning for setting marketing strategy are addressed. In addition, the empirical field work on evaluating the hybrid system is also summarised. The empirical evidence indicates that the hybrid intelligent system is helpful and useful in supporting the development of marketing strategy. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.