  In this paper, we address a variant of the marketing mix optimization (MMO)
problem which is commonly encountered in many industries, e.g., retail and
consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries. This problem requires the spend for
each marketing activity, if adjusted, be changed by a non-negligible degree
(minimum change) and also the total number of activities with spend change be
limited (maximum number of changes). With these two additional practical
requirements, the original resource allocation problem is formulated as a mixed
integer nonlinear program (MINLP). Given the size of a realistic problem in the
industrial setting, the state-of-the-art integer programming solvers may not be
able to solve the problem to optimality in a straightforward way within a
reasonable amount of time. Hence, we propose a systematic reformulation to ease
the computational burden. Computational tests show significant improvements in
the solution process.
