Meta-Heuristics In Marketing

In this chapter, we consider the application of mathematical optimisation algorithms to the field of marketing management. We describe the background and fundamentals of three techniques, simulated annealing (SA), tabu search (TS) and genetic algorithms and give, following a literature review, worked examples of relevant marketing areas to whcih each of these techniques can be applied, in particular sales territory alignment, segmentation and site location analysis. These indicate how each optimisation technique can be applied beneficially to market management optimisation problems.