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Forecasting

15 January, 2016 - 09:19

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. List steps in the forecasting process.
  2. Identify types of forecasting methods and their advantages and disadvantages.
  3. Discuss the methods used to improve the accuracy of forecasts.

Creating marketing strategy is not a single event, nor is the implementation of marketing strategy something only the marketing department has to worry about. When the strategy is implemented, the rest of the company must be poised to deal with the consequences. As we have explained, an important component is the sales forecast, which is the estimate of how much the company will actually sell. The rest of the company must then be geared up (or down) to meet that demand. In this section, we explore forecasting in more detail, as there are many choices a marketing executive can make in developing a forecast.

Accuracy is important when it comes to forecasts. If executives overestimate the demand for a product, the company could end up spending money on manufacturing, distribution, and servicing activities it won’t need. The software developer Data Impact recently overestimated the demand for one of its new products. Because the sales of the product didn’t meet projections, Data Impact lacked the cash available to pay its vendors, utility providers, and others. Employees had to be terminated in many areas of the firm to trim costs.

Underestimating demand can be just as devastating. When a company introduces a new product, it launches marketing and sales campaigns to create demand for it. But if the company isn’t ready to deliver the amount of the product the market demands, then other competitors can steal sales the firm might otherwise have captured. Sony’s inability to deliver the e-Reader in sufficient numbers made Amazon’s Kindle more readily accepted in the market; other features then gave the Kindle an advantage that Sony is finding difficult to overcome.

The marketing leader of a firm has to do more than just forecast the company’s sales. The process can be complex, because how much the company can sell will depend on many factors such as how much the product will cost, how competitors will react, and so forth—in fact, much of what you have already read about in preparing a marketing strategy. Each of these factors has to be taken into account in order to determine how much the company is likely to sell. As factors change, the forecast has to change as well. Thus, a sales forecast is actually a composite of a number of estimates and has to be dynamic as those other estimates change.

A common first step is to determine market potential, or total industry-wide sales expected in a particular product category for the time period of interest. (The time period of interest might be the coming year, quarter, month, or some other time period.) Some marketing research companies, such as Nielsen, Gartner, and others, estimate the market potential for various products and then sell that research to companies that produce those products.

Once the marketing executive has an idea of the market potential, the company’s sales potential can be estimated. A firm’s sales potential is the maximum total revenue it hopes to generate from a product or the number of units of it the company can hope to sell. The sales potential for the product is typically represented as a percentage of its market potential and equivalent to the company’s estimated maximum market share for the time period. As you can see in ***Figure 16.8 "A Marketing Plan Timeline Illustrating Market Potential, Sales, and Costs", companies sell less than potential because not everyone will make a decision to buy their product: some will put off a decision; others will buy a competitor’s product; still others might make do with a substitute product. In your budget, you’ll want to forecast the revenues earned from the product against the market potential, as well as against the product’s costs.