Patent ID: 8359226
Filing Date: 2013-01-22
Classification: G06Q

Abstract:
1. A brand equity management method for one or more products of which a brand having a life cycle is comprised, comprising steps of: providing, performed by a data storage module, generating by a data preparation module a training data for the one or more products based on said transaction data, marketing data and taxonomy data provided by said data storage module; generating by a reinforcement learning module a plurality of approximated Q-value models based on said training data provided by said data preparation module, wherein each approximated Q-value model is an approximation of a Markov Decision Process based Q-value functions of a policy, wherein the policy is a mapping function of an environment state s to a marketing action for the one or more products to be taken when in the environment state s wherein the environment state s is selected from the group consisting of: scoring by a scoring module the one or more given product items based on a given selected one of said approximated Q-value models to generate, for the one or more products, an optimized marketing policy, wherein the optimizing is with respect to maximizing a cumulative reward, wherein said scoring includes an iterative hill climbing starting from a given minimum value for the one or more products and repeating iterations, each iteration being in accordance with where s a r α is a given rate of convergence, and a′ is a transition action vector, wherein the iterations apply a given initial transition action vector a′ to said approximated Q-value models and, by the max operation, choosing a direction in which an incremental change of the action vector results in the largest increase in the Q-value generated by the approximated Q-value function, wherein the repeating iterations repeats until a given convergence criterion is met; and outputting an optimal mix of marketing action policies for the one or more products based on said scoring wherein said marketing mix includes marketing media selected from mass marketing, printing, TV, e-mail and catalogues, including maximizing a net present value of profits and losses over the life cycle of the brand.