Entretiens du Futur

This article is about whether Prospective, which is spread over a long-term span, could cross-fertilise others fields and specifically Marketing. Marketeers who fail to master all the subtleties related to the understanding of future trends could well be inspired by the art of ‘Prospective’ when it comes to improving their understanding of their clients.‘Prospective’ puts its finger on “what could occur?”, hinges upon strategy and is not inconsistent with Strategic Marketing, since the latter is about answering the following questions: “what can I do about it?, what I am going to do? , and how to do it?” (Michel Godet). To put in the words of Pierre F. Gonod, ‘Prospective’ is systemic, multi-dimensional and transverse. Besides, it has nothing to do with futurology and any comparison of ‘Prospective’ to any form of futuristic planning would be pointless. ‘Prospective’ is not about making up sales forecasts statistically; it is about eliciting a number of potential trends that we could subsequently use in order to build scenarios through the allocation of a probability. This practice is similar to predictive analysis in datamining, whereby one will resort to experience in order to perform patterns modelling (through the use of Neural networks, Kohonen cards, etc.). From a methodology viewpoint, one can find huge similarities between that definition of ‘Prospective’ and that of Market Surveys whereby areas of customer knowledge can be uncovered as we go along.