Optimizing Scalable Targeted Marketing Policies with Constraints

Targeted marketing policies target different customers with different marketing actions. Although most research has focused on training targeting policies without managerial constraints, in practice, many firms face managerial constraints when implementing these policies. For example, firms may face volume constraints on the maximum or minimum number of actions they can take or on the minimum acceptable outcomes for different customer segments. They may also face similarity (fairness) constraints that require similar actions with different groups of customers. Traditional optimization methods face challenges when solving problems with either many customers or many constraints. We show how recent advances in linear programming can be adapted to the targeting of marketing actions. We provide a theoretical guarantee comparing how the proposed algorithm scales compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks (primal simplex, dual simplex, and barrier methods). We also extend existing guarantees on optimality and computation speed, by adapting them to accommodate the characteristics of targeting problems. We implement the proposed algorithm using data from a field experiment with over 2 million customers and six different marketing actions (including a no-action “Control”). We use this application to evaluate the computation speed and range of problems that the algorithm can solve, comparing it to benchmark methods. The findings confirm that the algorithm makes it feasible to train large-scale targeting problems that include volume and similarity constraints.

History: Tat Chan served as the senior editor.

Funding: Y. Zhu received financial support from by the Ministry of Education, Singapore [Grant WBS A-8001730-00-00] and the National University of Singapore (NUS) [Grant WBS A-8000489-00-00]. Cloud resources involved in this work were partially supported by the NUS Cloud Credits for Research Program.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2023.0640.