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I-Prospective & Marketing
As an “Intellectual indiscipline”, the aim of ‘prospective’ is to “anticipate
action, to look far into the future, wide and deep” (Gaston
Berger).
The approach for the prospective researcher is to cast a
light on possible actions by focusing on the possible and
desirable futures.
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Denis Failly |
This article is about whether Prospective, which is spread over
a long-term span, could cross-fertilise others fields and specifically
Marketing. Marketeers who fail to master all the subtleties related
to the understanding of future trends could well be inspired by
the art of ‘Prospective’ when it comes to improving their understanding
of their clients.‘Prospective’ puts its finger on “what
could occur?”, hinges upon strategy and is not inconsistent with
Strategic Marketing, since the latter is about answering the following
questions: “what can I do about it?, what I am going to do? ,
and how to do it?” (Michel Godet). To put in the words of Pierre
F. Gonod, ‘Prospective’ is systemic, multi-dimensional and transverse.
Besides, it has nothing to do with futurology and any comparison
of ‘Prospective’ to any form of futuristic planning would be pointless.
‘Prospective’ is not about making up sales forecasts
statistically; it is about eliciting a number of potential trends
that we could subsequently use in order to build scenarios through
the allocation of a probability. This practice is similar to predictive
analysis in datamining, whereby one will resort to experience
in order to perform patterns modelling (through the use of Neural
networks, Kohonen cards, etc.). From a methodology viewpoint,
one can find huge similarities between that definition of ‘Prospective’
and that of Market Surveys whereby areas of customer knowledge
can be uncovered as we go along.
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II-The Seemingly Diverging Aims of
Marketing and ‘Prospective’
The available prospective cases (few of them can unfortunately
be disclosed for confidentiality reasons) are often focused on
the same industries: manufacturing, energy, defence, territories,
transport or technology. Such Prospective surveys are often ordered
by all-powerful public service administrations, quasi monopolies
and other quangos for which the notion of client often
verges on the abstract. Furthermore, some of these studies may
be initiated by politicians who use them like means of relaunching
their pet-projects when the latter have been ditched for too long
against their wishes. Consequently, such studies consider customers
just as economic agents (i.e. a mere statistical adjustment factor)
that is to say mere consumers in the economic sense of the term
but non-marketing entities. As a consequence, these studies where
customers are seldom analysed as complex, ever-changing, fluctuating
and self-motivated beings, often remain restrictive in their description
of reality. It seems inconsistent that customers be treated as
these marketing non-entities with no influence on and no link
to their environment, whereas in the real world of Marketing,
services are ubiquitous, customer behaviours are more and more
unpredictable, not to talk about the extreme volatility of customer
loyalty.
As a conclusion, in this ever-changing service-focused world,
it seems absurd that customers be considered marginal (i.e. having
little influence and very dependent on other economic players),
with little grasp on the world around them. As a matter of fact,
don’t data-intensive businesses consider the share-of-wallet as
a more meaningful measure than the traditional market-share ratio?
When considering online services, consumers also become producers
or even self-producers (hence the coining of the term pro-sumer
to depict that situation) of more and more dematerialised
goods; all of this makes them capable of initiating market changes
by themselves (e.g. the P2P revolution and its influence on the
music industry)
III-Complexity
As A Common Denominator
If it’s so difficult to allocate a better value to customers
in Prospective, this is because of the constant factor of complexity.
As expressed in my former article “ A Metaphorical Way Of Understanding
Customer Relationship ", where I
was using the Chaos and Quantum mechanics metaphor,
the amazing complexity and elusiveness of today’s Consumers cannot
be captured with standard market research and data analysis (aka
CRM) tools at our disposal. Determinism and rationalism are at
the heart of such tools, which prove highly ineffectual.
As a consequence, a few questions arise:
- Do we need complex tools to tackle such complex issues or
are simple tools that can be used by anybody sufficient, however
sketchy they may be,
- Should such methods and tools remain in the only hands of
experts or should one try and make them usable by all those
concerned with the subject,
- At last, given that Prospective does not seem to be able to
handle these customers, should we deem such a customer Prospective
infeasible or even undesirable?
In fact, in order to move the ball forward, a link between the
two disciplines would have to be established:
- On the one hand, Marketeers could work with prospective professionals
in order to enhance their culture of service processes,
- On the other hand, those in charge of Prospective could help
Marketeers enhance their vision in order to incorporate more
variables (economic, demographic, etc.) and provide them with
different ways of analysing markets (therefore looking at key
hidden variables or latent players or even budding fads that
could help Marketeers catch a glimpse of future trends).
IV-The Strategy
Factor
Michel Godet has provided ways of describing behaviours (reproduced
below) when it comes to handling future situations. We could use
this description in order to compare both the Prospective and
Marketing approaches with one another and see what sort of incremental
benefit could be gained from such comparison. With all due consideration,
one could even attempt to look at what Marketing could gain from
adopting some of the approaches of Prospective.
First, let us compare the each of these fields as to their time
and space dimensions:
- Prospective is geared towards the long term (10, 15, 20 years
and more), the global vision. With prospective, what matters
most is not the result but how one got there in the first place.
With Prospective, besides, maps know no boundaries,
- Marketing Management is mostly short-term orientated (either
very short term or up to 5 years at the most, depending on how
far into strategy we are looking). At the end of the day, Marketing
management efficiency is measured by bottom-line results.
Potential
Behaviours When Handling Future Situations
- Passivity: no planned scenarios, mostly tactics but no strategy,
aim is to maintain status quo and avoid looking reality in the
face,
- Re-activity: no planned scenarios, adaptive strategy, respond
only when external threats are perceived,
- Pre-activity: exploratory scenarios, pre-emptive strategy,
prepare business for expected changes,
- Pro-activity: scenarios by anticipation, implement changes.
V-The
360° View
In order to improve our approach of customer understanding, we
need to go one step further and bring a third essential ingredient:
Sociology. Sociologists are best defined as those specialists
who decipher social events and mechanisms whereby relationships
are built between people and groups of people (community, ‘tribe’,
etc.). As such, they are obligatory players in our eyes, when
it comes to analysing the elusive social characters that consumers
have become (or even citizens for that matter). Individuals do
influence markets through the social groups that they belong to
(sometimes named ‘tribes’) as much as they are influenced by them
(‘feed-back’ effect). As a matter of fact, in the 1970’s, a group
of professionals dedicated to ‘social prospective’ had a goal
of enhancing Prospective and promote it as part of ‘knowledge
sociology’ (P. Gonod). But such skills as are necessary to conduct
such a task are rarely to be found in one individual, if one except
a few strategic planners, often found in advertising agencies.
Pending the availability of such sophisticated profiles, a 360°
view could well be provided by a better cooperation between two
kinds of players:
- Marketeers who are rather customer-focused (i.e. on behaviour
analysis at a micro-economic level),
- And specialists in Prospective who are more into vision (at
a macro-economic level), into the interactions between various
economic players and into exploring possible perspectives (“what
could occur”, which possible scenarios, likely, desirable? etc.)
At the end of the day, such cross-fertilisation of disciplines,
processes, structures, people and professionals would be aimed
at encompassing complexity and this is most certainly bound to
bring interesting results.
Denis
FAILLY
Consultant,
Marketing and Market Surveys
To
Contact Denis Failly click here
Further reading
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- Gonod P.F Dynamique des systèmes et méthodes prospectives,
Travaux et Recherche de prospective, 1996 ».
- "Penser
l'incertitude"
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