By Rudiger Papsch, Managing Director, GfK HealthCare Asia

The ability to make accurate forecasts is important for any organization, and this applies in particular to health care companies. Reliable forecasts allow market opportunities to be identified and optimally used, whereas poor forecasts can result in substantial financial losses through lost opportunities or misallocation of scarce resources. 

However, forecasting is a complex and challenging task and it is therefore not surprising that forecasts can be and often are erroneous. At the same time much progress has been made over the past decades in research on forecasting, directly tackling these challenges. 

For us as pharmaceutical marketers and marketing researchers, the concept of “different” has meaning on a number of levels. We are in a different environment, studying a different set of stakeholders playing under a new set of rules. Additionally, a major part of our job description is typically to make our product appear “different” enough from competitive offerings that it should enjoy customer use.

This month’s published document for The Orange Pages discusses Different, a book by Youngme Moon, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, that will challenge you to view this concept in an entirely new way. 

Click here to read the issue, which includes:

• Good Practices in Forecasting and Good Forecasting in Practice – Part One
• Hamlet's Blackberry
• Vanderveer's Views: In Memoriam

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