Decision Support Systems as the Bridge between Marketing Models and Marketing Practice

The field of marketing decision models emerged about fifty years ago. In the beginning, optimization techniques from the field of Operations Research (OR) were dominant, but soon, the modeling of marketing phenomena and marketing problems became interesting in itself, irrespective of whether they could be solved with a known OR technique. The field of marketing models developed its own identity and became an important academic field (Wierenga 2008b). Somewhat later the term "marketing science" became in vogue, as a close synonym to marketing models. In this current, first decade of the new Millennium, the field of marketing science is in excellent shape with booming journals and exponentially growing numbers of publications. However, a legitimate question can be asked: what is the impact of this growing body-of-knowledge on marketing practice? Does all this work lead to better marketing management decisions? In other words "Was macht die Wissenschaft fur die Unternehmenspraxis?" (Simon 2008). One important flow of marketing knowledge to marketing practice goes through marketing education and marketing literature .. The newest marketing insights are disseminated through courses, textbooks and other communication channels. But there is another important way of making the results from marketing science useful for marketing practice.