Campaign Management of the Fourth Generation

Campaign management enables companies to address customers in the best possible way with suitable campaigns according to given marketing objectives. Currently three approaches of campaign management have evolved in practice, differing in the way of selecting customers for competing campaigns. These three generations of campaign management still show clear improvement potential, so a new beginning is introduced in this contribution. This paper shows a new approach for campaign management based on improvement potential of the preceding generations.The major aspect of our approach is a simultaneous selection of customers and campaigns. The expected utility for all customers and campaigns is maximized taking into account the whole planning horizon and all resource limitations. For the implementation of this new approach optimisation models and specific heuristics are introduced. They can be used separately or in combination depending on the complexity of the problem. It is shown that this simultaneous planning of the fourth generation is superior to present approaches.