Marketing Analysis Detecting Weak Signals
It is arguable that many organizations have difficulty recognizing the strong signals that face them.
There has, however been a considerable amount of academic discussion about weak signals. These are small pieces of information that signal important changes which are as yet unrecognized, since their main impact has yet to come.
The discussion, largely by academics, has concentrated upon retrospective analysis. Thus, the signals that Japanese manufacturers were coming to dominate certain industries (the motorbike industry, for instance) were, once you look for the related signals, apparently obvious; yet they were totally overlooked by the existing suppliers in these markets.
This is an important message to covey to those conservative organizations which have long since settled into a comfortable rut and may not be able to read the danger signals.
The problem is that while it is easy to see these patterns with the benefits of hindsight, it proves very difficult indeed to detect them in advance.
These severely limits the practical implementation of any formal scanning processes.
Since those signals are by definition weak, there is no obvious evidence of the special importance, and hence they are not easy to spot.
Worse still, they are buried amidst large amounts of similar data which act as ‘noise’, drowning out these faint signals.
The only general recommended solution is that the reader should be an informed observer who knows rather better than most (because he or she is an expert in the industry for instance) which of these weak signals is most important. Even so, the task is a very difficult one.
There was a suggestions that the key is to look for pattern – a sequence of signals – but two errors can follow. The first and most likely is to miss the signals altogether. The second, at the opposite extreme is to find a pattern which is not really there.
Other suggestion is that one way of tracking weak signals is to set thresholds (for instance, that a senior politicians has to become involved with an issue or that a journal considers it worth an editorial comment) above which signals are then tracked.
It has to be recognized, however that setting any such thresholds requires considerable expertise.
Marketing Analysis Detecting Weak Signals
