Airbus Drops A380 Super-Jumbo Jet

In June, 2006, I posted about the different strategies and market forecasts of Airbus vs. Boeing.

Airbus thought passengers would be flying hub to hub in giant jets like the A380. Boeing thought passengers would be flying point to point in smaller jets.

Now, more than 12 years later, Airbus has decided to discontinue its super-jumbo A380. Orders had been dropping off . . . and now Airbus will remove the 380 from its product line.

It turned out, Boeing's vision of how passengers would prefer to travel, coupled with tech advances in jet fuel economy and airline decisions, made a big difference in marketing new commercial jets.

Planning with the Far Future in Mind

Marketing plans usually cover the next 6-12 months, with the exception of some new product intros, which may cover 12-24 months. But every plan must take into account developments that might arise months and years into the future--because those environmental shifts (technological, political, cultural, etc) can potentially derail even the best plan.

If Cisco had, for instance, taken a close, critical look at the eventual future of consumer pocket videocams, would it have bought the Flip business? As it turns out, video has become extremely important to Cisco's future marketing plans--in terms of videoconferencing for B2B customers, not in the consumer world.

So how do marketers stimulate creative thinking about future directions for their industries, technologies, customer needs, cultural preferences, and so on?

First, cast a wide net and think big. I like to listen to the FourCast podcast for ideas about how technology might change 3 or 5 or 100 years in the future. Sure, some of the predictions are outlandish, but they're also entertaining and imaginative. A lot of new ideas are packed into every podcast. The MIT Technology Review just published an interesting issue about the future, based on ideas rooted in science fiction.

Second, take advantage of all kinds of data for your markets, like the UCLA Anderson Forecast series for Southern California. Technical, to be sure, but broad trends are addressed and may help you think creatively about future opportunities and challenges.

Third, look beyond the numbers to uncover the reasons for what's happening. Are car-top luggage carrier sales going through the roof just as the economy is tanking? Thule had that situation, which turned out to be an indicator of how consumers would react to difficult economic times. Interpreting such changes isn't always easy but it will provide additional clues to broader trends you should incorporate into your marketing planning.

And, because the marketing environment can be disrupted by "once in a lifetime" events such as the nuclear problems in Japan, touched off by extreme weather conditions, consultants Booz & Company advise management to think about black swans, "high-magnitude, low-frequency upheavals" that can turn a business on its end.

Forecasting via Crowdsourcing

This week's Fortune has an article about how David's Bridal and other (unnamed) retailers are using or testing online games to forecast hot styles and plan purchasing. The company behind the Sold game (shown above) is FirstInsight, which is leveraging consumers' enthusiasm for such online activities to crowdsource reaction to potential or actual products. Soon FirstInsight will have its forecasting games on Facebook so consumers who are avid Farmville or Frontierville players will be able to play in ways that help marketers forecast demand.

This is a variation on the online prediction market (shown in Exhibit 10.7 on p. 180 of my new US edition) that more marketers are using to tap the collective wisdom of customers or employees or a combination of stakeholders who can "bet" on the outcome of events such as the date when a new store is likely to open. Although such tools are high profile in the political world, they're less well-known in mainstream marketing.

Want to see how Sold works? Try the demo here. Maybe the game won't allow retailers to precisely forecast demand, but it has potential to indicate relative demand (which item is likely to be among the most popular within a given product line, for instance).