A Decision Support System for Optimizing Advertising Policy of a National Tourist Office: model Outline and Case Study

Application of standard optimization routines to advertising decision-making is straightforward once the relationship linking market response to input has been modeled adequately. Sometimes, however, advertising management has to cope with decision situations where econometrics fail to detect a reliable relationship. A new decision support procedure eliciting managerial judgments on the pairwise relative importance of market share influence factors provides the factor weights otherwise inaccessible by objective parameter estimation. Allocation of an advertising budget to international travel markets thus becomes susceptible to optimization through dynamic programming.