Marketing Engineering: Computer Assisted Marketing Analysis and Planning

LILIEN, GARY AND RANGASWAMY, ARVIND 1998, Marketing Engineering: Computer-Assisted Marketing Analysis and Planning, revised edition compatible with Office 97, Addison-Wesley Publishers, Reading, Massachusetts, 400 pages, $118.00.

If engineering is "calculated manipulation or direction," then what is marketing engineering? Lilien and Rangaswamy do not offer a formal definition but suggest that it involves the use of decision models to make marketing decisions. This is in contrast to what they term "conceptual marketing," which relies on mental models to make such decisions.

Marketing Engineering is part of a more comprehensive package consisting of text (Volume 1), a set of 25 software tutorials (Volume 2), and videotapes. It was designed primarily for an MBA elective course in marketing. Marketing Engineering is organized into four parts comprising 11 chapters. Part 1 is an introduction in which the authors lay out basic concepts of marketing decision making and market response models. Parts 2 and 3 concern formal models keyed to various marketing decisions-segmentation, positioning, strategic analysis,...