Evolutionary Computational Techniques in Marketing

Motivation and Background

The Internet and social networks are key factors that have strongly affected market competition, as they provide customers with more choice in products, services, and prices. For instance, well-established electronic commerce companies such as Amazon, Booking, TripAdvisor, and others provide rankings of their products based on past customer reviews. In the same vein, social networks are a powerful tool to spread good or bad comments about products or services, and they can directly influence potential clients, since the members of the same social network usually share interests and have similar economic levels. For those reasons, marketing teams have focused efforts on creating intelligent business strategies. New artificial intelligence approaches to marketing have emerged, especially evolutionary algorithms used to solve a variety of marketing problems such as the design of attractive products and services for consumers, the analysis of populations or social...