FUTURE MARKETS · Demography-Based Market Forecasting Tools

As a side product of the ERC project “Future Societies” an innovative combination of the genuinely demographic approach of Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis with a new expert-argument-based method of anticipating future period changes evolved that could have great commercial potential as a new quantitative science-based tool for forecasting future consumer preferences and demands for all kinds of goods and services at national and international scales. In marketing terminology, it has a potential for forecasting market potentials.APC analysis has been used in demography to decompose the forces that drive changes in population composition with respect to critical characteristics of people: Age effects are patterns that change with age and affect all individuals (e.g. grey hair)