The Marketing Engineering Imperative: Introduction to the Special Issue

A s we enter the new millennium, we are at the end of the era when firms could gain and sustain competitive advantage merely by having market data. Today large firms have access to more market and customer data than they can use. Having too much data without the models and systems for discovering what is important and what can be discarded can be as bad (or worse) than having too little data. Indeed , at least one survey Wierenga and Van Bmggen 2000, p. 51 found that managers reported that they were rece~ving increasing quantities of information and half of those interv~ewed reported that they were unable to cope. Those managers reported ill health and worsening personal relationships, along with other symptoms, such as paralysis of analytic capacity, increased anxiety, self doubt, and a tendency to blame others. Increasmgly marketing managers are being asked to clear the same budget-justification hurdles imposed on other types of investmen& firms make. It is not surprising, therefore, that more managers are seeking help in turning their data and knowledge into improved decision making. Over the years, the marketing field has produced a number of successful decision models and decision-support tools that facilitate sophisticated thidang about mar-ketlng problems. Several have been successful Edelman Prize entries, such as Gensch, Aversa, and Moore's [I9901 use of choice models at ABB Electric, Lodish-~~ ~~ ~~ ~ et al.'s 119881 work at Syntex Laboratories , and Wind et al.'s [I9891 use of con-joint analysis to design the successful Courtyard-by-Marriott chain. These applications represent what we call marketing engineering: the systematic process of putting marketing data and knowledge to practical use through the planning, design, and construction of decision aids and marketing management support systems. Until recently, the models and the approaches that marketing engineering embraces have been available only to those few managers in large organizations who have had strong motivation to access them and a large budget to support them. With the wide availability of computers on'net-works and emerging user-friendly software, however, organizations increasingly apply these modeling approaches. We have discussed elsewhere W e n and Rangaswamy 1998; Lilien and Rangaswamy 2000; and Lilien, Rangaswamy, Van B ~ g g e n , and Wierenga forthcoming] a number of trends that are enhancing the ability of organizations to benefit from the marketing engineering approach. Those trends are all associated with wider availability of hardware , software, and …