Heuristic and Exact Methods to Solve the Direct Marketing Problem Considering Cannibalism between Products

This paper deals with the problem of the selection of sets of clients that will receive an offer for one or more products during a promotion campaign. Such campaigns are fundamental marketing tools for improving the economic profit of a firm, either by acquiring new customers or by generating additional revenue from existing customers. We work with a well know mathematical model for the problem adding the cannibalism constraint, that avoids some products to be offered simultaneously. We propose two hybrid heuristics, the first combining GRASP and Tabu Search and the second Genetic Algorithm and Tabu Search. Extensive computational experiments were performed on a set of test problems from literature with and without the cannibalism constraint. For small and medium instances we solved the mathematical model by CPLEX and update the literature bounds, for larger and real life instances the heuristic approaches still seems more suitable.