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Keywords
Marketing management, Agents, Decision-support systems, Information technology
Abstract
Marketing management presents challenging ground for the integrated use of intelligent agents. The design of a strategic marketing plan presents a natural division of four distinct yet independent decision problems. Concurrent execution of these four functions can yield a significant decrease in time-to-market for new products, and turnaround time for modified products. Electronic information is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it results in information overload, taxing the decisionmaking process. On the other hand, the electronic nature of these vast information flows makes them accessible to intelligent agents who can improve the decision-making process. This paper presents the problem of information overload and decisionmaking complexity in marketing management. In it, we present a blackboard-based agent architecture that allows individual agents to proceed toward their given goals yet react opportunistically to developments reported by other marketing agents. We present the blackboard model of problem solving, and discuss why it is well suited to support multiple marketing agents. CMA, a multi-agent model for concurrent marketing analysis, is discussed and the agent architecture required for creating a cooperating society of marketing agents is presented.
Introduction
Marketing management involves a series of complex tasks that necessitate dealing with vast amounts of information. The problems of information overload have been welldocumented in studies by Jacoby (1977), Bearchell (1989), and more recently by Meyer (1998). As Meyer (1998) notes, information overload is the result of an interplay between a growing technology-driven supply of information, and an equally increasing demand for information generated by technology-savvy marketing managers. This combination of push from the supply side and pull from the demand side has created unprecedented levels of information overload.
Information overload deals with but part of the information problems of marketing management. It is decision complexity that drives the creation and use of marketing information in the first place. The need for information is a direct result of the decision demands placed on a marketing manager and these demands are predominantly due to the main decision tasks faced by marketing managers on a daily basis. Dealing with these decision tasks has traditionally been the goal of marketing decision support systems (MDSS).
This paper presents a new approach to marketing decision support...