Selection of Customers for Marketing Campaign as a Multi-Criteria Problem

Here we discuss the issue of planning a telemarketing campaign which will promote new services and use databases of the current customers. The databases can contain data of hundreds of thousands up to a few million customers. To ensure the best possible efficiency of the marketing action, certain conditions have to be satisfied: among other things, the campaign has to be planned so as to present at most one offer to each prospective customer. The problem discussed here can be treated as a vector maximization problem. The consecutive components of the vector criterion function are the numbers of the services sold of each kind. The campaign may have as its objective the creation of a plan which maximizes the profit or the total number of the services sold. The problem can be also regarded as hierarchical; one can also apply other known scalarization approaches, which will be described here. The problems to be solved are large-scale binary linear programming problems. We present a possible solution of these problems using the R package.