In the past "customers" of market research were above all Product Management and Board Members. Lately there has been an increasing demand by R&D. Due to increasing research costs, R&D is facing higher pressure for success. This is why there is an increased interest in market orientated research. As it takes about 10 years from finding an active ingredient until market introduction of a new product, research is mainly interested in long term market trends (i.e. Oct-15 years). Product Management and Board rather need market estimates for the next 01-Feb years. Market research can react in three different ways: 1. Don't give any answers: "We are not able to predict the future" (very little sucess, this would be interpreted as a lack of competence). 2. Do as if the market of tomorrow is identical to that of today (usual experience, but not very realistic) 3. Be creative. The following contribution illustrates how we have progressed with the Scenario technique at Schering.
This paper is based on one method of prediction: namely scenarios derived from indirect inference of survey results. Scenarios are a useful perspective within which the complex inter-relationships between the environment, individual business goals, objectives and feasible strategy options can be seen and understood by management. A useful scenario allows one to integrate "soft", social trends into decision making and to reconcile them with the "hard", economic factors. Behind much of the scenario development is the basic idea that what determines a society's characteristics are individual's values and concerns. These are often the motor force behind social change. The refraction and distillation by which changing values and concerns are translated into social change are still very imperfectly understood. But this paper takes one particular phenomenon, namely, the changing attitudes to the family and relates it over the last decade to individual attitude statements from survey research. The relationship between attitude questions related to having children, sexual roles, female careerism on the one hand, and social value shifts on the other are explored with a view to gaining insight into the dynamics of social change.
The operating environment for many businesses is increasingly affected by social and political pressures, in addition to economic and technological ones. The need for systematic planning is generally accepted by business, but until recently it covered only the economic and technological aspects of its environment - social and political trends were taken into account only implicitly. There is nothing new in saying that societal dimensions are relevant. What is new is the attempt to develop planning procedures in which the more qualitative social aspects are explicitly considered. The development of multiple scenarios has provided such a mechanism. Each of the scenarios must be internally consistent, but discontinuities can be built in to them, so that "the future" need not reflect the past to any great degree. In addition, these scenarios provide the basis for scanning and monitoring the business environment. This paper describes two scenarios : a "hard times" for the United Kingdom; and "hard times" for the United States. The presentations of each are quite different, and illustrate the variety of ways in which scenarios can be developed. The final section of the paper provides a brief description of the development and use of scenarios.
The term scenario is familiar to those involved in forecasting, but too few people are aware of what exactly a scenario is, or how it can best be developed and applied. The author describes a method developed over several years in response to a need which most forecasting efforts have left unfulfilled. The method enables quantitative and qualitative forecasts to be combined in a manner which can be directly related to an organisations planning and decision-making processes, and which permits the evaluation of a companys objectives and performance in the light of those forecasts. The analysis of an organisations likely performance in given scenarios can, in turn, provide a basis for contingency planning.
In developing scenarios, the four main areas generally considered are economics, technology, society, politics. Business is accustomed to relating the potential state of the economy to its operations in terms of business confidence; willingness and ability to invest; availability of finance; interest rates; inflation and so forth. Similarly, in areas of technological change, the technologies examined are generally competitive or complementary and are evaluated in terms of their feasibility, acceptability, cost, etc. These two areas can be related quite clearly to the functions of finance, investment, RSD and strategic planning.