Selecting a mix of magazines for delivering targeted sales promotion

Magazines are often used to deliver product samples and coupons directly to a target audience. This paper introduces and demonstrates a vehicle selection heuristic which accommodates managerial estimates of direct marketing program effectiveness in the target group, and program “waste” on nontarget groups (e.g., nonusers of the category and current brand loyal users). The approach, pivoting on widely available data and using a microcomputer, reduces the direct marketer's dependence on management science and data processing personnel, and efficiently allows the evaluation of various “what if” situations.