Potential Uses of Linear Programming in Small Enterprises – The Case of Allocating Advertising Expenses of a Small Service Company in Crete

One of the most important functions of enterprises is advertising as a means of systematically ap-proaching specific market segments and informing prospective customers for their products, services or even their existence. The purpose of every advertising campaign is to achieve the greatest possible im-pact, to the market segments addressed, within the frames of a given budget and under a set of qualita-tive or quantitative constraints. The cost to benefit relationship of such a campaign is an important issue for every enterprise and in particular for small or medium ones. Linear programming can contribute to-wards the effective allocation of advertising expenses and the use of MS Excel Solver facilitates the so-lution of the resulting mathematical models. A method for the allocation of advertising expenses among available advertising vehicles using LP and Microsoft Excel's Solver on actual data is described