Bridging the marketing theory-practice gap with marketing engineering

New developments in marketing management support systems (MMSSs) have provided the marketer with a growing supply of tools that can enrich decision making. In this paper, we describe the concept of marketing engineering - an approach to solving marketing decision problems - popularized by Lilien and Rangaswamy [Lilien GL,Rangaswamy A. Marketing engineering: computer-assisted marketing analysis and planning, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998.]. We describe how marketing engineering harnesses marketing data and knowledge to facilitate decision making. We provide several illustrations of the successful application of the marketing engineering concept. We also summarize developments that we believe will further encourage the adoption of the marketing engineering concept and tools for both teaching about marketing decision making, and for improving the practice of marketing decision making. We conclude with some challenges for the academic research community. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.