A Stochastic Optimization Model for Consecutive Promotion

Abstract

Nowadays in business environment, marketing competitiveness is as demanding as ever. To survive under keen competitions, industries must keep acquiring customers and make them loyal while maximizing profit from their service subscription or product purchasing. Intensive research works have been done in answering when and what kind of promotions should be used under limited marketing communication resources to maintain a perpetual generation of revenue. In this paper, we investigate the advantages in consecutive promotion based on the framework of the model proposed in Ching et al. [1]. The customers’ behavior is modelled by using a Markov chain and we aim at maximizing the expected profit using stochastic dynamic programming. We find that a multi-period promotion strategy is better than the strategy of applying several single-period promotions in our tested examples.