Simulation gives insight into long-term advertising effects

This article discusses how long-term effects from advertising can be modelled. Customers and markets differ, and aggregate data conceal many varieties of detailed behaviour, so that advertising effects are hard to isolate.

Simulation gives insight into long-term advertising effects

Robert Stratton

Emergence is a phenomenon that occurs when simple, low-level processes interact to create a complex overall pattern. Well-known examples include the way that crowds move, birds flock and sand dunes form.

Although each element in the process is moving according to simple rules, the high-level pattern that emerges can be hard to explain or predict without reconstructing how the individual components interact to create it.

In the same way, the different components of customer behaviour can combine in ways that make an emerging pattern of sales or product usage difficult to...

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