Words Fly, Documents Rest. Restfull Decision Supportive Documents For Marketing Managers. towards a Paradigmatic Change in the Interaction Between Managers and Marketing Scientists.

In this paper we argue that browser based web technologies and statistical calculation webs-services have attained a degree of maturity that makes it possible to embed powerful Marketing Decision Support Systems (MDSS) into static web pages. We call such pages Decision Supportive Documents (DSD). Besides solving managerial problems, DSD can be highly illustrative and play an important role in the coproduction, pedagogy and adoption of marketing models. By paraphrasing the latin proverb “Verba volant, scripta manent” in English “words fly, writings remain”, we conjecture that, as documents, MDSS tend to remain or “rest” with managers and prolong interactions with marketing scientists in a paradigmatic shift towards MDSS coproduction. This coproduction is substantially facilitated and becomes literally “restfull” due to a very recent initiative to open up statistical calculations as RESTfull web services, REST meaning here REpresentational State Transfer. An application to retail chain CRM is presented.