DEMAND FORECASTING  

Future period sales can be forecast by combining univariate forecasts for price, marketing, economic and competitive factors and substituting them in the sales response function from the marketing-mix model.

Once weights are generated through marketing-mix models that measure relationships between marketing input variables and sales, forecasts can be generated scoring these weights against future values of the marketing input and competitive variables. Future values of input variables can be generated using automatic univariate forecasting algorithms (for e.g. ARIMA).

Longer term forecasts can be generated by infusing demographic shifts in the consumer target markets.                                             

Forecasting is useful as a strategic tool to plan pricing and marketing budget allocation, and assess the impact of competitive activities.