英语翻译Over the years,the marketing field has produced a number

英语翻译
Over the years,the marketing field has produced a number of successful decision models and decision support tools that facilitate more sophisticated thinking about marketing problems.Such models can help develop marketing strategies and plans,help anticipate the value of implementing those plans,and provide measurement frameworks for evaluating the impact of marketing plans and strategies.Yet,until recently,these models have only been available to those few managers who have been motivated to search for and locate them.
However,with the wide availability of computers and emerging user-friendly software implementations of marketing decision models,there is a growing interest among managers to use these models for both strategic and tactical decision making.A new area of marketing is emerging which helps to combine data,knowledge,managerial judgment,and computer software to facilitate decision making,which we call marketing engineering.In our view,marketing engineering is an important instrument for bridging the gap between marketing theory and practice.In this paper,we define marketing engineering,summarize the trends that favor its growth and adoption by managers,articulate the potential benefits and costs of adopting the marketing engineering approach,and illustrate a few successful applications of this concept at leading companies.While we also highlight some important research findings,we need much more research to understand ‘‘why’’ and ‘‘how’’ marketing engineering influences decision processes and outcomes,and to quantify the benefits that can be gained by adopting marketing engineering for addressing various marketing decision problems.We conclude with some thoughts on how the marketing engineering concept will evolve in the near future and identify several related challenges for the academic marketing community.
2.The marketing engineering opportunity
Marketing managers make ongoing decisions about product features,prices,distribution options,sales compensation plans,etc.In making these decisions,managers choose from among alternative courses of action in a complex and uncertain world.Like all decisions that people make,marketing decision making involves judgment calls.Most traditional marketing decision makings,while sometimes guided by the concepts and tools from our literature,have been largely based on managers’mental models,intuition,and experience.