What’s in it for me?

Pitching askmarkets around and as we gain a bit of experience, we often face this customers’ question: {ok, it’s cool/ great idea/ sounds very interesting, but} what’s in it for me?

To be honest, this sounds like an almost self-explicable question to us: Markets are applicable everywhere, wherever people and information co-exist. And every decision to be taken involves one or more estimations about the future; improve them and you will get a better decision.

The truth is, we cannot but be strongly biased towards the ubiquitous applicability of our services, after spending several years on researching the topic and developing the tool itself. But things are different out there. For a good reason.

In a given business setting, which already works, one needs to have a clear view of the potential benefits a new tool could bring into his organization, and finally assess if these benefits justify the need and cost for change. Being cool, or interesting, is not a force of change, but having a tangible benefit that offsets these costs is and, after all, each pitch needs to finally come up with a cogent answer on the initial and most important of questions.

Here’s our answer.

We fundamentally believe that askmarkets is helping your organization succeed in:

- bringing people together
Employees along with customers, insiders along with outsiders, essentially everyone with relevant information, keen interest or simply curiosity on the topics that matter.

- fostering conversations
“Markets are conversations” (Cluetrain Manifesto, Thesis #1) and we enable you to easily facilitate them around the clock and at almost no cost, serving as the conductor of your custom crowd.

- summing up information
Conversations do generate tremendous value for your business, provided that you are able to aggregate the information they host. Markets appear to be the best tool to do so; you may just let askmarkets do the rest.

- transmitting it through prices
Where lies wisdom, there lies opportunity and transmitting the insights and information produced is equally useful to collecting them. The fact is, collection and transmission of information are the two sides of the same coin when it comes to askmarkets. Early indicators, actionable signals and reality-driven decision support are to follow.

After all, you will be bringing in the right mix of people, motivations and interest, while hosting conversations in a setting proper enough to eliminate biases and balance between being utterly professional, yet equally engaging and playful. At the same time, you will be able to transform the totality of relevant information into proper metrics, markets prices and probabilities that is, while transmitting these results in real time to everyone interested.

To us, these are the most important of benefits askmarkets will contribute in your company or community. And, as you probably figured out, we didn’t refer to predictive accuracy, or anything directly related to that. And that’s because people tend to overestimate, or actually not to understand the great oxymoron behind the overselling of “predicting the future”. In practice, a tool’s forecasting ability should not be judged against a virtual fool-proof prophet, as such a tool simply cannot exist; you’d better compare it with other existing tools or widely-used mechanisms, finally leveraging on the supremacy of one over the others.

Markets appear to be the one to stand out, at least as theory, experiments and practice so far typically indicate (that said, you need to remember that this comes with no absoluteness or strict mathematical proof). Moreover, markets’ unique nature is further highlighted by serving as the only mechanism each time revealing its probability of failure (for example, an askmarkets’ stock priced at .70, at the same time indicates a 30% probability of not turning correct etc). Finally, they essentially consist a meta-mechanism that potentially taps and continuously weights, among others, the outcomes of other tools (while at the same time cannot but follow the principle of “garbage in, garbage out”).

The short presentation that follows attempts to provide a short abstract to the above, next to an attractive narrative.

Still, after all these, people ask for practical examples, and use cases. So, here are two of them.

Case I, Retailer (private marketplace)

Retailex Corp. is a very healthy and profitable organization. It is focused on a bunch of great products, which imports, stores, distributes and finally sells across a wide range of customers. With capable and much experienced employees, next to an extended network of salesmen and distributors, Retailex is a well-structured and efficiently functioning enterprise, optimized to deliver great products to its customers and value to its shareholders. Digging into its main cost drivers, one comes up with inventory and transportation costs throughout the supply chain, the management of which finally ends up to the estimation of future demand and the communication of early indicators that may arise across the various parts of the chain.

The company is by now using a couple of methods to forecast its sales, therefore manage its logistics into a more efficient way. The tools in use track the weekly or even daily sales using the advanced ERP (which costed a really significant amount of money) and attempt to extrapolate the given data to come up with proper estimations, while surveys of the managers’ perceptions are performed quarterly to get a feeling about what’s coming. However, it seems that these approaches do not meet the company’s needs. Shortage of various products is a usual case in many points of sale, while other products remain devalued by the big inventory. These facts equal to a tremendous amount of opportunity and money being not wisely spent, while the uncertainty of the given economic situation is expected to further highlight the problem.

This is where askmarkets come into play. The number of employees, salesmen and distributors in a sense stands as a powerful network or tree, continuously collecting information about the topics of importance for the enterprise. Asking all these people about such topics, while providing a sufficient motivation, next to a simple but capable platform, enables the collection and filtering of this vast amount of informational resources back to its roots, where decision making takes place. For example, managers’ information cannot be but limited, while monitoring data have little to do with being proactive. At the same time, each salesman comes into touch with a number of people each day, shaping his mind on the top of the information he collects. And each salesman or distributor contacts with a different set of people, or has unique experiences, helping to finally come up with a unique perspective on the topics of interest.

Finally, askmarkets enables Retailex to aggregate the perspectives of all people across the supply chain on the topics that matter for the company, including sales per month, product or distribution point, next to products’ import and transportation costs, and pricing. In a few words, askmarkets serves the company as the ceaseless and seamless aggregator and filter of the information flow across the enterprise, providing real-time insights and a significant competitive advantage for both the day-to-day and the strategic decision making. Wouldn’t you bet on it?

Case II, Marketing (public marketplace)

Marketex Corp sells some high-end products, putting most of its efforts (and budget) on marketing. Echoing this fact, the marketing department has an extended list of liabilities, next to a really significant share in the decisions taken across the enterprise. Among all others, the department runs a bunch of campaigns each year, while keeping track of the industry and competitors in various markets, measuring customer behavior and satisfaction, also monitoring selected performance indicators that are considered of crucial value for the enterprise. And the department is comprised of highly experienced employees, with a strong intuition and understanding of both the core characteristics and latest developments in the industry.

However, it has lately become clear that, no matter of the expertise and experience of its members, the marketing department -and the whole company at large- is failing to detect significant turning points in its customers’ behavior and preferences, competitors strategic moves, after all the evolvement of the industry. And this is not due to a lack of focus or devotion; the company is performing everything it used to do to get a clear view of what is happening out of its corporate offices. Surveys, focus groups, industry reports, and meetings, meetings, meetings, all have a prominent place in the company’s arsenal, when it comes to supporting its marketing decisions. However, results suggest them as almost incapable; and there are probably both the tools and their users to blame for. The marketing manager put it like that in a recent board of directors: “It is like either the information we possess is very partial, or the tools we are using to filter it and sum it up are inadequate. In my personal opinion, both these are true. We need a different approach.”

At the same time, Marketex enjoys a considerable number of devoted customers, who could easily be characterized as fans. Their passion and brand loyalty extent at a level that they do know every Marketex product in detail, while tracking the competitors moves and other evolutions in the industry (so as to be able to refuel their passion, or not). In a sense, Marketex’s marketing department extends to these people, too, as they largely perform what the company needs to, at a much bigger scale, free of cost, and without the biases that typically accompany all such intra-enterprise relations. The idea is clear. Marketex needs to get this group of people together, motivating them to contribute their beliefs and, by appropriately aggregating them, shape an insightful input for its decision making.

Askmarkets come to the rescue. A public marketplace is set up, on the topics of interest for Marketex. Competitive intelligence, efficiency of the latest campaigns, customer satisfaction, evolution of publicly available performance indicators, all these and other crucial topics are turned into market questions and literally outsourced into the Marketex community. A symbolic prize given to the 5 most efficient traders further enhances the engagement and, a few weeks after the launch, Marketex includes in its arsenal a more than valuable tool that monitors in real time the information and perceptions of hundreds of experts, providing the greatest of insights for some really successful decisions. Still looking for the market leader?

Well, in the case that the above use cases sound as being too close to your organizational reality, you may check out our Services or contact us directly for more details. If not, we are here to create together with you your very own askmarkets story, by empowering your company or community to optimally use askmarkets for your specific needs and requirements.

After all, we do believe that now it’s high time to turn potential into value and discrete resources into collaborative ones. Tough times require wise decisions and wisdom lies in the crowds. You may leave the rest to askmarkets.