An allocation of marketing effort

Well-known goods do not sell well these days. However goods are required to be easily recognizable. This paper treats an optimal allocation of marketing effort just after new items have been put on the market. The optimal allocation minimizes the number of people who cannot recognize the new items. We consider two types of means of communication. The first type includes television and newspapers that reach great numbers of people. The second type includes standing signboards and neon signs that reach small numbers of people. Formulating our allocation of marketing effort into a non-linear program, we develop an efficient algorithm for it. We give an illustrative example and show the result solved by the proposed algorithm. In addition, we show the relation between unrecognition and marketing effort amount.