Concurrent marketing analysis: a multi‐agent model for product, price, place and promotion

Marketing management presents challenging ground for the integrated use of intelligent agents. The design of a strategic marketing plan presents a natural division of four distinct yet independent decision problems. Concurrent execution of these four functions can yield a significant decrease in time‐to‐market for new products, and turnaround time for modified products. Electronic information is a two‐edged sword. On the one hand, it results in information overload, taxing the decision‐ making process. On the other hand, the electronic nature of these vast information flows makes them accessible to intelligent agents who can improve the decision‐making process. This paper presents the problem of information overload and decision‐making complexity in marketing management. In it, we present a blackboard‐based agent architecture that allows individual agents to proceed toward their given goals yet react opportunistically to developments reported by other marketing agents. We present the blackboard model of problem solving, and discuss why it is well suited to support multiple marketing agents. CMA, a multi‐agent model for concurrent marketing analysis, is discussed and the agent architecture required for creating a cooperating society of marketing agents is presented.