ABSTRACT
Marketing models and problems are becoming increasingly complex, requiring the use of sophisticated solution procedures. This is leading to an increasing utilization of meta-heuristics. In this article, we present three population-based meta-heuristics: genetic, memetic and electromagnetism-like algorithms. We present the main characteristics of these techniques, as well as some applications in management in general, and marketing in particular. The article shows that the use of these meta-heuristics is on different phases of maturity: genetic algorithms have a wide range of applications in the marketing field; memetic algorithms have many applications in different fields of management, but not so in marketing; electromagnetism-like algorithms are now starting to be applied in a wide variety of fields. We present an application example of an electromagnetism-like algorithm to a marketing problem, and we discuss some paths of future research concerning the application of these meta-heuristics to marketing problems.
