Knowledge Dynamics in Contemporary Marketing - From Holistic Marketing to Computational Marketing

The systematic treatment of meta-theory in marketing began during he middle of the 20th century. The dynamics of science and technology, of knowledge in general, as well as new consumer mentalities have often changed the dominant views within Marketing. Starting out from the holistic concept introduced by Kotler ( 2002) to the field of Marketing, we propose to establish a bridge to Computational Marketing. The multi-agent stochastic nature of marketing decisions and the intricate, know-ledge-based process of the marketing oriented product design create the premises for using massively data-based computational methods, which can complement both theory and empiry in fundamental and productive ways, as can be learnt "by analogy", e. g. from the relatively new successful sub-branches of long-established disciplines like computational physics, chemistry or biology. Well organized computational approaches can find solutions genuinely integrating a client's preferences into new product designs, to collect and filter such preference from extremely large client networks and to recommend useful items to many millions of clients, thus promising to transform holistic marketing concepts into highly adaptive and widely visible real-world marketing processes. In order to make such processes work effectively, a series of issues from knowledge representation, of modeling data and knowledge and of identifying widely scattered consumer data have to be addressed in the spirit of a human-centered conceptual approach. In this contribution we propose such an approach along the lines of learning, based on information and knowledge flows within Computational Marketing, pointing to a way by which the Intellectual Capital of organizations transforms into market performance.