Abstract

This article indicates that management sciences, realistically applied, can offer unique, yet economic, solutions to certain kinds of marketing strategy problems. The main thrust of progress in marketing management has been toward fact-founded, research-oriented decision making and the replacement of intuition or 'hunch" by a serious effort to quantify marketing variables. It is useful to view marketing as comprising a spectrum of activities ranging from broad over-all strategic decision making to more or less mechanical administration. Systems applications such as inventory control and scheduling of delivery fleets are a direct and logical extension of the traditional engineering-oriented systems from which the management sciences grew.