Abstract

This article focuses on the competitive marketing simulator as a new management tool. Business decisions are growing increasingly complex and expensive. This has stimulated the interest of business executives in refined models for decision making. Many executives have welcomed the development of operations research models for capital budgeting decisions, traffic decisions, inventory and production decisions. Of all the functional areas, marketing seems to be marked by the least analytical progress. Personal intuition continues to play a much more important role in this type of decision making than formal analysis. Many of the present mathematical decision models seem to be too simple to portray dynamic marketing processes. Thus programming models tend to require several unrealistic simplifications in solving for the optimal marketing mix; and formal game theory offers very little actual guidance in competitive decision making. At this stage, pure mathematical representations of marketing problems are suggestive rather than adequate.