A
Use of Predictive Deduction in Management Consulting:
Anticipating the Demise of Advertising and Branding
The Client: A Fortune 500 company with core competencies in sales, advertising and/or marketing and/or a business model that relies on advertising and/or branding.
Their Need: The client is engaging in strategic planning. They are a large enough company such that it would take them several years to substantially alter their core competencies and/or business model, so they want to develop a 10 year forecast to determine now whether they will need to have made such alterations before then.
How
Predictive Deduction Helps: We use predictive deduction to evaluate the
prediction that advertising and branding will become ineffective in the next
5-15 years and that the client should therefore begin to shift their
model/competencies. One might interpret this analysis as proving merely that
certain kinds of advertising and branding will become ineffective or merely that
they will become ineffective for certain kinds of products/services, but, in any
case, it has significant implications for the client. Since it identifies all
of the factors that control the actualization and timing of the predicted
events, it empowers the client to fine-tune the timing of their tactics by monitoring
these factors, and, so far as they can control these factors, to act
rationally towards delaying or accelerating the timing of the events. Since
non-deductive analysis cannot be proven to identify relevant factors as
thoroughly, predictive deduction is an irreplaceable component of the “mine
sweeping” aspect of strategic planning.
The analysis has four parts. First, it offers a deductive argument in support of the prediction that ‘filter-agent-matchmaker’ systems will proliferate through a process of generalized evolution so as to neutralize the effectiveness of advertising and brand equity. Second, to support the argument’s premise that the predicted events are possible, it offers an account of one way in which the events could occur. Third, it offers a provably complete list of the possible alternate scenarios. Finally, it describes the timeline that the evolution would follow, identifying, based on the laws of generalized evolution, the factors controlling the timing of each step.