Building Models For Marketing Decisions

This book is about marketing models and the process of model building. Since models explicate the relations, both the process of model building and the model that ultimately results can improve the quality of marketing decisions. This text describes marketing models that managers can use as an aid in decision making. Even simple models outperform human judgements in predicting outcomes in a wide variety of contexts. More complex models potentially provide insights about structural relations not available from casual observations. Although marketing models are now widely accepted, the quality of the marketing decisions is critically dependent upon the quality of the models on which those decisions are based. In this book, which is a revision and expansion of Naert and Leeflang's "Building Implementable Marketing Models" (1978), the authors discuss in detail the model-building process. They distinguish four parts in this process: specification, estimation, validation and use of models. Throughout the book, the authors provide examples and illustrations.