How's your company shaping up to ride the wave? Is your market intelligence the best it could be? Are you positioned for the next big thing? Perhaps it’s time you got some professionals in to process the numbers, analyse the trends and tell you what your customers want next. Or perhaps not. Once upon a time you had a marketing department to come up with the best way to shift the goods. On to the street went the market researchers armed with their psychology degrees and customer questionnaires. Back came the information about target groups and client needs and your product range got tailored accordingly. When the downturn arrived and sales returns were the bottom line, what you really needed was some hard technical data. The market research got a little more finely tuned and in came the PEST analysis with its demographics and social profiling. Downsizing and outsourcing became flavour of the month and so you offloaded your market analysts to cut costs. You hired some business consultants instead to size up the market, look the business over and revamp your approach. But the experts’ prescriptions for the future were based on even shakier evidence than before. The trends they predicted failed to materialise most of the time, and the ones that did were often too vague to be of much practical use. In the stock market some do things differently. Databases full of company figures tell them what sold well and when and at what volume. Charts and averages indicate if the stock is still going up or is about to fall. Even here though, with the search for investor momentum and statistically significant change, market advice is still anchored in simple psychological assumptions about which way investors will jump in a crisis. Can past figures, either from the markets or consumers, really predict future trends more accurately than the laws of probability? Warren Buffet, an experienced investor and currently the world’s richest man, doesn’t think so. If this was the case, he says, librarians would all be billionaires. With the explosion in information and ever cheaper and more accessible technology to monitor it, many companies think they are just as well-equipped to do the trendwatching themselves. The smart movers already scan the stock market news, read the blogs, network with the competition or just get out there with the consumers themselves. Set up a working group to discuss developments, brainstorm reactions and distribute the ideas on a regular basis and you’re on your way to having your own in-house trend locator. Soon you’ll have a flow of information as useful as any provided by a firm of consultants. And at a considerable saving. Perhaps trend spotting begins at home. |
