Product selection for promotion planning

Abstract

This paper addresses a very important question-how to select the right products to promote in order to maximize promotional benefit. We set up a framework to incorporate promotion decisions into the data-mining process, formulate the profit maximization problem as an optimization problem, and propose a heuristic search solution to discover the right products to promote. Moreover, we are able to get access to real supermarket data and apply our solution to help achieve higher profits. Our experimental results on both synthetic data and real supermarket data demonstrate that our framework and method are highly effective and can potentially bring huge profit gains to a marketing campaign. © 2010 The Author(s).