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434 Alternative decision-support systems
Focusing on the process of marketing strategy development, McDonald 7
has commented on the knowledge that marketing experts possess, using
phrases such as ‘intuition’, ‘instinct’ and ‘intuitive artistry’. This phraseology
indicates that the nature of the knowledge and rules employed by
marketeers may be difficult to elicit.
Nevertheless, those who have accepted the veracity of Rangaswamy
et al.’s checklist have argued for marketing expert systems. Stevenson
et al., 8 for example, in considering the realm of industrial marketing, suggest
that because many tasks are ‘semi-structured’, requiring decisions
to be made with ‘incomplete knowledge’, etc., then ‘... expert systems
usage is appropriate and valid’. We contend, however, that the simple
presence of a judgmental component in a task, or the usage of inferential
processes by experts, is not sufficient to ensure that representing such
knowledge in an expert system will be viable or cost effective.
As we shall discuss in the next section, it is our opinion that certain
domains of the marketing discipline are amenable for modeling and
automation, while others are not – and that, unfortunately, marketeers
have tended to concentrate on the most inappropriate ones. This is
in marked contrast with successful expert systems which have been
developed for financial service applications which we describe in the
subsequent section. By documenting successful and unsuccessful applications,
we can identify situations in which repetitive, routine decision
making can be effectively automated.
Marketing applications
Moutinho and Paton 9 document some expert systems which have apparently
been developed for marketing applications. Among these are
MARKETING EDGE, which advises marketeers on which segments to
target, how to price a product and which distribution channels to use.
LITMUS II ‘combines expert judgments, proprietary data bases and
automated intelligence algorithms to search through billions of possible
marketing plans to find the most profitable one’.
Similarly, the ADVISOR expert system ‘consists of a data base of the
actual marketing objectives’. Unfortunately, it is impossible to check
the veracity of the claims since no reference to the availability/source
of these products is given in the article. To our minds, the claims
seem ambitious. However, other researchers are more positive about
systems to aid marketing planning. 10 For example, one study advocates
that SWOT analysis (of the capabilities of the firm and the nature of
the business environment) can be linked to a company-wide executive