What are the principles of market forecasting

Foreknowledge of the future is not only human desire, so prediction has long been there, including the myth of "know 500 years before and 500 years after", so prediction has fallen a dishonorable predecessor called "divination".

If a company can achieve a certain degree of foresight, the benefits to business operations are self-evident. Of course, it is impossible to be completely prescient, otherwise everyone would be a millionaire and every business would be thriving.

While the business of the future can not be grasped, but human understanding, thinking progress so that people find the "law" of the importance of the ancients had a long time ago, "discernment of the road, along the way," said, "Road! "is the law, with the accumulation of historical experience and scientific and technological progress, mankind's ability to recognize nature has greatly enhanced. As a business, to find, recognize and use the "law" (including the market, customer, technology, business development) on the business of the enterprise must increase the chance to grasp.

The basic principle of forecasting

In the simplest and most understandable terms: it is a model of the following

Law, trend, logic, experience, and the essence of the ability to analyze the problem and means.

The four principles of editing

The prediction itself should be made with the help of methodologies such as mathematics and statistics, as well as with the help of advanced means. Let's not talk about the techniques and methods, for the managers of the enterprise, may be the first concern is how to form a set of effective way of thinking? The following principles may be of some inspiration:

Relative principles

Built on the "categorization" of the height of thinking, focusing on the correlation between things (categories), when the understanding (or assumptions) to the known changes in a certain thing, and then deduce the trend of change in another thing.

The most typical correlations are positive and negative, not exactly data-related, but more "qualitative" in terms of thinking.

(1) Positive correlation is the "promotion" between things, for example, the average income of residents and "100 households with air-conditioning"; a company recognizes that "the only child is valued. A company recognizes that "the attention paid to one child" has led to the market for toys and education-related products and services; the government of a certain region has repeatedly asked enterprises the question: "What opportunities are brought about by the improvement of people's material and cultural standard of living", which is actually one of the biggest opportunities facing the unknown market at the present time! The successive development of the region's "home appliance industry", "kitchen revolution", "health care products" should be the result of full understanding and detailed implementation. This also reflects the enterprise's sense of opportunity. Conducted by the census, some experts have suggested that the information is the enterprise's "treasure", depending on how you recognize: a large furniture business, the start of one of the biggest opportunities to grasp is "China's third wave of fertility of these people are now to the peak of the establishment of a family! "

(2) Negative correlation, refers to the mutual "constraints" between things, the development of one thing leads to another thing is limited. Especially "alternatives". For example, the introduction of resource policy, environmental policy will inevitably lead to the emergence of "disposable resources" alternatives, such as "wood instead of steel" developed PVC plastic steel; a mandatory scrapping of power-assisted vehicles, the place of an "electric bicycle "Enterprises keen to seize the opportunity is the same.

The principle of inertia

The development of any thing has a certain degree of inertia, that is, at a certain time, under certain conditions to maintain the original trend and state, which is the theoretical basis of most of the traditional forecasting methods. For example, "linear regression", "trend extrapolation" and so on.

Principle of analogy

Market forecast related charts

Market forecast related charts

This principle is also based on the high level of thinking of "classification", focusing on the correlation between things.

(1) From the small to the big - from a phenomenon to the development of the trend: for example, existing people began to buy private cars, what do you foresee? This idea should be used to prevent generalizations and generalizations.

(2) from the surface to the inside - from the surface of the phenomenon to the substance: for example, "unified food" in Kunshan, Wuxi, "in the extract of the noodles" should realize what? "Hailier" laundry detergent to the southern part of the big promotion, "Jiajia laundry detergent" realize that may be to steal the market. To take the simplest example, the emergence of disposable liquid lighters is really an example of a match factory not realizing the threat.

(3) From this to the other - the introduction of foreign advanced management and technology can also be explained by this idea. You remember the saying: what is obsolete in developed areas may have a market in backward areas.

(4) Mao Zedong said a sentence: I am not Li Zicheng. It can be seen that the history of the thing is extremely instructive for the future development. In other words: who dares to think of having an air conditioner, a computer and a telephone in their home? We ask: Can you think that you will have your own automobile 10 years from now? This kind of reasoning is quite inspiring for businessmen. Can you summarize the development pattern of TV sets in Chinese households? Perhaps you can find a business opportunity there!

(5) From far and near - such as foreign products, technology, management mode, marketing experience, methods, because it may be more progressive, it represents the advanced direction, may be "tomorrow's road".

(6) Bottom-up - from the typical local deduction of the whole situation, a moderate size of the township, the need for three harvesters, there are 50 similar townships in the county, you can initially estimate that the county's harvester may be the market capacity of 150 units.

(7) Top-down - Subdivision from the big picture in order to recognize and infer a certain localization. For example, if we want to know the market capacity for ladies bicycles in a city of 400,000 people, 400,000 people - 200,000 females - (take out the under 12s over 50s) and 100,000 - -Survey the ratio of women bicycling per 1,000 people (assuming 60%) - the possible market volume is 60,000 It's helpful to get a rough idea of a market.

Probabilistic extrapolation

We cannot fully grasp the future, but based on experience and history, we can many times roughly predict the approximate probability of something happening, and based on that likelihood, take countermeasures. Poker, chess games, and corporate gaming-type decisions use this principle unconsciously. Sometimes we can determine the likelihood of a situation occurring through scientific methods such as sampling designs and surveys.