Survey of Customers’ Buying Plans
What more sensible way to forecast than to ask customers about their future buying plans? Industrial marketers use this approach more than consumer-goods marketers, because it is easiest to use where the potential market consists of small numbers of customers and prospects, substantial sales are made to individual accounts, the manufacturer sells direct to users, and customers are concentrated in a few geographical areas (all more typical of industrial than consumer marketing). In such instances, it is relatively inexpensive to survey a sample of customers and prospects to obtain their estimated requirements for the product, and to project the results to obtain a sales forecast. Survey results, however, need tempering by management’ specialized knowledge and by contemplated changes in marketing programs. Few companies base forecasts exclusively on a survey of customers’ buying plans. The main reason lies in the inherent assumptions that customers know what they are going to do and that buyers’ plans, once made, will not change. Even though the survey of customers’ buying plans is generally an unsophisticated forecasting method, it can be rather sophisticated – that is, if it is a true survey (in the marketing research sense) and if the selection of respondents is by probability sampling. However, since it gathers opinions rather than measures actions, substantial no sampling error is present. Respondents do not always have well-formulated buying plans, and, even if they do, they are not always willing to relate them. In practice, most companies using this approach appear to pay little attention to the composition of the sample and devote minimum effort to measuring sampling and no sampling errors.
