It has been almost a year of my involvement in a project of global marketing mix optimization solution for a large consumer packaged goods company. Conceptually, the problem is simple: given a fitted model of a company’s revenue as a function of promotion campaigns for its products, and using past year’s promotion campaigns allocation scenario as a starting point, find a revenue maximizing scenario subject to promotion expenditure constraints.

Figure 1: A visualization of a step in a solution of an optimization problem. To see the full dynamic visualization, go to theory.info.

The problem becomes more interesting when we go into details. (more…)