Bad Managers - The Rumour Mill

Market Researchers "Will start making accurate predictions by June 2004" says Market Researcher

16 December 2001, 17:37 GMT

A Market Forecaster Hard at Work

To be precise, says Gonad Group senior researcher Robbie Couch, the first run of accurate predictions will be made at 4.30pm on 12 June 2004.

When asked whether he meant EST, GMT or some other timezone, Couch replied that he wasn't sure, but that it should not adversely affect the outcome of his study.

Market Researchers have had something of a bad run recently:

"WAP, EDI, CRM and now Web Services"

* Predictions abounded about how (for example) Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, would become the next really, really big thing.

* A rather amusing 1963 Gonad report predicted that "Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, will revolutionise the way all companies everywhere do business, and will mushroom beyond simple cases of food stores and supermarkets ordering, say, mushrooms and baked beans."

* Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, has also failed to take off in a big way, despite enthusiastic predictions to the contrary.

"Frogs and Locusts"

Web services are the latest in a long line of attempts by market researchers to kick-start a few bandwagons into motion, and cynics have already predicted that this new technology will be a semi-successful, slightly pointless damp squib at most. Not the market researchers though.

"We see a heterogeneous future of interconnected devices by August 2009," Couch predicts. "That doesn't mean that there will be interconnected devices in 2009," he added, "but that in 2009 there will definitely be a future of interconnected devices."

He explained: "Each device will connect to a big network a bit like the Internet, scoot around for a bit, and discover all the related services that it needs. It'll be a bit like Jini, only re-invented. And everything'll all be squirted through Port 80!"

"What's the point of service discovery?" programmer Billy Johnson wonders. "A very small number of types of application will need to use the likes of UDDI. Most of the time, a client app will already know what it needs to use, and where to find it. This whole discovery thing is simply adding a totally pointless layer that is just there to slow things down."

"Nostradamus"

"To be fair," Gonad spokeswoman Lizzie Fret advised, "most market researchers have made the occasional prediction which later came true. It's a bit like horoscopes, or Nostradamus, or tea leaves - they make so many predictions, they're bound to get lucky eventually. Based on this theory, we understand that the prediction industry is spiralling upwards, with an ever increasing number of predictions being made."

Robbie Couch confirmed this piece of expert industry knowledge.

"And," he added, "with the number of predictions increasing, an increasing number of those is bound to come true, whether by coincidence or simply because the market forecasters are getting more practise."

"Prediction Expiry Zone"

"So," he continued, "all we need is to somehow find a way to weed out all the wrong predictions, before - and this is the crucial part - before the prediction expiry zone."

'Prediction expiry zone' (PEZ) is a special market research term that is loosely defined as the date when a prediction ceases to be valid, e.g.

"Frogs and locusts shall dance upon the sidewalks of most major cities by July 2, 2003"
[Forrester Research, 1998]

For this example, the PEZ would begin on or around Feb or March of 2003, when serious doubt about the prediction's validity begins to creep in. As June of the same year approaches, with still no sign of any frogs or locusts (or at least a relatively small number, e.g. a hundred or so in just one or two major cities), the prediction's validity seriously starts to expire.

"Frog Sighting Threshold"

Frog based financial predictions are an increasing source of angst amongst traders that must base vital market decisions on such things. A curious phenomenon known as the Frog Sighting Threshold (FST) often manifests, where the research company starts to glom onto each and every frog sighting in the country, and blows each one out of all proportion in a slightly sad attempt to justify their original prediction (e.g. a recent New York Times front page headline, "Frog Sighted on Pavement in Queens" was later traced back to a small market research company in Denver).

Companies that have made crucial business decisions based on these predictions usually become quite unhappy about 2-3 months into the PEZ. To cover themselves under such common circumstances, most market researchers add a clause such as "...unless some sort of event, happening, incident or trend occurs that may under certain circumstances imbue innaccuracy or wrongness."

"In fact using the power of this cop-out clause," Couch pointed out, "almost every market research prediction ever made has sort of turned out to be true, whether right or not. We don't need to influence the market with self-fulfilling predictions or the like; by covering every possible base, we're always right!"

>> Follow-Up Story: Market Researchers Harness Massively Parallel Tea-Leaf Predictions