Marketing Engineering™ is a term coined by Dr. Gary Lilien. It is a systematic approach to harness data and knowledge to drive effective marketing decision making and implementation through a technology-enabled and model-supported interactive decision process. In an organizational setting, the Marketing Engineering approach requires the design and construction of decision models and the implementation of those models in the form of marketing management support systems (MMSSs).
The purpose of Marketing Engineering is actually to simplify the decision context and create a decision architecture to help focus on the key issues. Without simplification, noise rather than insights drive people's decisions. A good decision model therefore focuses attention and limited resources on the decision at hand.
- ABB Electric, a manufacturer and distributor of power generation equipment, wanted to increase its sales and market share in an industry that was facing a projected 50% drop in demand. By carefully analyzing and tracking customer preferences and actions, it determined which customers to focus its marketing efforts on and what features of its products were most important to those customers. It credits its ability to go from just 4% to over 40% market share, while raising its profitability in a declining market, to its ME application of choice models (Gensch, Aversa, and Moore 1990).
- The Marriott Corporation was running out of good downtown locations for new full-service hotels. To maintain its growth, Marriott's management planned to locate hotels outside the downtown area that would appeal to both business and weekend leisure travelers. The company designed and developed the highly successful Courtyard by Marriott chain using a key ME approach: conjoint analysis (Wind et al. 1989).
- Syntex Laboratories was concerned about the productivity of its sales force. In particular, managers were unsure whether the size of the sales force was right for the job it had to do and whether the firm was allocating its efforts to the most profitable products and market segments. The company used an ME resource sizing and allocation tool to develop sales force deployment strategies -- and added over $25 million in annual profits over and above its strategic plan (Lodish et al. 1988).
- Books - Learn the important concepts behind Marketing Engineering and how various analytical marketing tools can help your firm.
- Software - Run quick and simple analyses with Marketing Engineering for Excel software. The software is designed as an Excel Add-in to ease the learning curve and allows you to run a quick analysis using a number of common Marketing Engineering models.
- Consulting - DecisionPro and its partners offer a full complement of support services for marketing analytics including problem scoping, research design and implementation, data analysis and recommendations, report generation, and client presentations.
- Webinars - DecisionPro in conjuction with the ISBM Decision/Insight Series has produced a series of free webinars introducing the Marketing Engineering topics. Archived versions of these webinars are available for viewing.