Knowledge acquisition for marketing expert systems based upon marketing problem domain characteristics

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present various knowledge‐acquisition methods and to show how existing empirical research can be used for mapping between marketing problem domains and knowledge acquisition techniques. The key to doing this is to create a taxonomy of marketing problem domains.Design/methodology/approach – This paper combines a thorough literature review with prima facie conceptualization to map a generic problem domain, and thereby provide guidance in the choice of knowledge‐acquisition technique for developers of expert systems in the field of marketing.Findings – Recent empirical research in the field of expert systems shows that certain knowledge‐acquisition techniques are significantly more efficient than others for the extraction of certain types of knowledge within specific problem domains. It is found that protocol analysis, while fairly commonly used, is relatively inefficient for analytic problems. In the synthetic problem domain, interviewing proves to perform better fo...