Typical Nature of Marketing Decisions (What Makes Decisions Difficult in Marketing?)

Corporate managers have to face mostly the same type of decisions, however, the economic content thereof may exhibit severe differences. Decisions in marketing deviate from those of other functional areas of a company in many aspects. Regarding market decisions, demand dominates besides costs, and the analysis of factors affecting demand is more difficult. The large number of factors affecting demand, the relations between them as well as the nonlinear nature of these relations may be mentioned as example. Most of the interacting factors are out of the company’s scope and rapidly vary in time. Information constituting the basis of decisions is often incomplete, in many cases inaccurate, increasing severely the risk of a marketing decision. Managers therefore have to be aware of the specific properties of marketing problems. The decision system should be designed accordingly, concerning the structure of marketing organization, the selection and operation of the applied decision processes, as well as the establishment of a market oriented IT background with market focused view.