I always felt that the marketing and finance domains are wonderful application areas for intelligent systems, and this book demonstrates the synergy between marketing and intelligent systems, especially soft computing.

Essays.- Marketing and Artificial Intelligence: Great Opportunities, Reluctant Partners.- Data Mining and Scientific Knowledge: Some Cautions for Scholarly Researchers.- Observations on Soft Computing in Marketing.- Soft Computing Methods in Marketing: Phenomena and Management Problems.- User-Generated Content: The “Voice of the Customer” in the 21st Century.- Fuzzy Networks.- KDD: Applying in Marketing Practice Using Point of Sale Information.- Marketing – Sales Interface and the Role of KDD.- Segmentation and Targeting.- Applying Soft Cluster Analysis Techniques to Customer Interaction Information.- Marketing Intelligent System for Customer Segmentation.- Using Data Fusion to Enrich Customer Databases with Survey Data for Database Marketing.- Collective Intelligence in Marketing.- Marketing Modelling.- Predictive Modeling on Multiple Marketing Objectives Using Evolutionary Computation.- Automatic Discovery of Potential Causal Structures in Marketing Databases Based on Fuzzy Association Rules.- Fuzzy–Evolutionary Modeling of Customer Behavior for Business Intelligence.- Communication/Direct Marketing.- An Evaluation Model for Selecting Integrated Marketing Communication Strategies for Customer Relationship Management.- Direct Marketing Based on a Distributed Intelligent System.- Direct Marketing Modeling Using Evolutionary Bayesian Network Learning Algorithm.- Product.- Designing Optimal Products: Algorithms and Systems.- PRODLINE: Architecture of an Artificial Intelligence Based Marketing Decision Support System for PRODuct LINE Designs.- A Dempster-Shafer Theory Based Exposition of Probabilistic Reasoning in Consumer Choice.- E-Commerce.- Decision Making in Multiagent Web Services Based on Soft Computing.- Dynamic Price Forecasting in Simultaneous Online ArtAuctions.- Analysing Incomplete Consumer Web Data Using the Classification and Ranking Belief Simplex (Probabilistic Reasoning and Evolutionary Computation).

The success of companies is partly dependent on the generation of suitable knowledge upon which to base decision-making, and due to the centrality of the marketing function in organizations, marketing-related knowledge is of strategic relevance. In this connection, it is unlikely to reach a full understanding of any set of systems supporting marketing management without paying the necessary attention to the Artificial Intelligence-based methodologies applied to aid marketing-related decisions. However, as yet these methods are both under-developed and under-used. This book represents a notable and creative step forward in this respect. The editorial project has especially focused on the so-called Marketing Intelligent Systems, a cutting-edge category for marketing management support that focuses on a sophisticated treatment of knowledge by Soft Computing and other machine learning techniques. The reader will find smart reflections on this general theme from diverse world-leading marketing academics through short essays, and a collection of chapters devoted to a variety of applications – segmentation, modeling, e-commerce, etc. – using different technologies such as clustering, evolutionary algorithms, multi-agent systems, or fuzzy logic.