Chapter 7 Incorporating Market Intelligence into the Forecast

As a marketing professor, I am constantly subjected to good-natured needling from my supply chain management colleagues. One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons provides them with potent ammunition. In this strip, Dilbert makes the observation that “Marketing is liquor and guessing.” Well, I made the point in Chapter 4 that forecasting is, at its core, guessing about the future. I won’t agree that liquor is involved, but it is certainly the case that the “guessing” that is inherent in demand forecasting can be upgraded to “informed guessing” by the inclusion of market intelligence as a part of the forecasting process. That is the subject of this chapter—what types of market intelligence ...

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