Incorporating Managerial Thinking in Prediction and Control: Case Study of Market Penetration

Managerial strategies, especially at the higher echelons of management, are often linguistically stated. This is because they need to be based on information which often defies quantification. Such verbal strategies and qualitative information have often been found to be difficult to incorporate in quantitative models. Thus, the quantitative effects of implementing one strategy as opposed to another have generally been difficult to forecast.In this paper, we show that, through the use of fuzzy logic, we can incorporate such qualitative (linguistically stated) information. Furthermore, we show that a fuzzy controller can be designed so as to reach desired goals while being cognizant of linguistically stated strategies, scenarios, and decision rules as well as quantitative data types.The approach is applied to the modeling and control of market penetration, a field which has attracted considerable attention in recent years.