Abstract:

As Research Office of a large Company of organised distribution including a chain of Department Stores, Variety Stores and Supermarkets we have been visited in the last years by a great number of businessmen from foreign countries who were faced with the problem of estimating the Italian market from the point of view either of the potential sales of an entirely new product or of a product with certain new characteristics such as brand, packaging etc. These operators came to us after having found out how very little help they could get from official statistics as these' never seemed to give them sufficiently detailed and specific information on the particular problem they had to solve in order to reduce as far as possible the risks of their initiative. Let us give a few examples of the type of information that businessmen who: came to visit us were seeking for and could not find. A producer of terry cloth bath linen wanted to know the structure of the Italian market in terms of volume of sales analysed by; a) various articles of terry cloth bath linen sold; b) sales by sizes of these various articles; c) sales by colour.