by

Scott M. Smith

and

William R. Swinyard

Internet Text January 1999

May Not Reproduced without the Permission of the Authors

Only a few years ago when someone heard about the construction of a computerized marketing model, the saw mental pictures of mainframe computers, expensive run times, and writing and debugging thousands of lines of program code written in difficult computer languages.

With the development of personal computers, all this has changed, and that is the purpose of this book. By writing this book, we make a number of quantitative marketing models available -- some of which had been available only to a few individuals, in mainframe computer versions -- to anyone having a personal computer, an Excel spreadsheet, and a few hours of time. The models we include are many of the most widely known and most useful in marketing.

If you are familiar with the marketing models literature, you will recognize their names: ADBUDG, MEDIAC, Parfitt and Collins, Fourt and Woodlock, MDPREF, BCG, and so on. Even if you are not familiar with these -- and we suspect that means most of you, or you would not be reading this book -- you will appreciate the ease of use of all of them. Their translations into spreadsheets, with extensive use of menus, makes some sophisticated marketing models available for use by just about anyone. At least, that is what we hope, and that is the purpose of this book.

Accompanying this text are software spreadsheets and programs Each program or spreadsheet accompanies discussions of them beginning with Chapter 5. The first four chapters of the book provide a background to model building, marketing model building, Excel macros and Visual Basic Editor (a set of command structures produced by Excel) If you are already familiar with these concepts, just skim these chapters and then start digging in with Chapter 5. Most of you will get maximum satisfaction out of the book by studying the first four chapters carefully, and practicing the exercises at the end of the chapters.