Social Forecasting for New Products

Forecasting new products is hard for a retailer like Tchibo. There is no past data to use in statistical models, consumer surveys and test sales are expensive. Tchibo decided to apply Social Forecasting - a new approach from the Enterprise 2.0 area. Social Forecasting utilizes the knowledge of employees and transforms it into hard numbers, e.g. sales forecasts for new products. With Social Forecasting Tchibo was able to achieve extreme cost savings while maintaining a high accuracy in forecasting demand for new products.