Quantitative methods in marketing

Abstract

Marketing was one of the last of the major functional areas of management activity to be entered by quantitative methods and techniques in a systematic way, and only in the last four decades or so was any significant progress achieved. This relative lag of quantitative methods progress in marketing was attributed to a number of factors:1 The complexity of marketing phenomena.This is due to the fact that when stimuli are applied to the environment, the responses tend to be non-linear, to exhibit threshold effects (a minimum level of stimulus needs to be applied before response occurs), to have carry-over effects (e.g. response to this period of advertising will occur in future) and to decay with time in the absence of further stimulations.