Marketing Research—A New Tool for Security Analysis

Abstract

W ITHOUT DOUBT a coming development in the security analysis field will be the use of information to help predict the growth or decline of companies and industries, and the resulting stock movements. By marketing is meant, simply, the process of getting a company's products into the hands of its consumers. Such activities as product design, sales operations, advertising, and retailing are some important examples of processes. For reasons that we shall see, the fortunes of most companies-and even industries-can be, and often are, drastically altered by events taking place in the process. And what is most important for this discussion is the fact that these events occur well before any inkling of their effects appears in sales figures or other data readily available to the security analyst. If, therefore, there were a way of observing the events as they occurred and properly interpreting them in terms of their eventual influence on sales and profits, the security analyst would have an immensely powerful weapon to add to his arsenal.