If we cannot predict hurricanes – how are we to predict buying behavior?
David Wolfe over at Ageless Marketing has a great post on the difficulties associated with predicting consumer behavior. Comparing the process to our inability to predict hurricane paths with the help of supercomputers he says: “I have to believe that human behavior reflects more variables and is significantly more complex than weather behavior.”
The good news according to David is that customers will tell you what they want – but in order to get that information, you need to get it in “real life context” – as opposed to research environments where customers tend to behave differently than in real life.
[Tags: market research customer research ]
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September 12th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
The purpose of marketing analytics is not to predict marketing outcome with 100% certainty. Rather, marketing analytics and research attempts to decrease the variance between predicted and actual outcomes. Marketing will never be 100% science but it is important to keep in mind that it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.