1. Now that so many companies have Web companions and/or e-commerce components to their business, do you think more traditional methods such as telephone surveys, focus groups, response cards, and analyzing sales data will become obsolete?

Why or why not?

“One thing we do differently here than people do in most businesses is we don’t budget, we forecast,” claims Bryan Welch, publisher and editorial director of Ogden Publications.
Ogden Publications is a small publishing house based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They publish 13 magazines, including Mother Earth News, Natural Home, and Utne Reader. A few years ago, these titles and others from their catalog were only available in specialty bookstores, often those with a more eco-conscious clientele. The green movement has done wonders for Ogden in the past few years. Now, many of their titles are sold at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore or at hardware stores.
“I will tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that the five-year forecast is accurate six months out. Beyond that, it is wildly inaccurate,”
says Welch. So why bother? “The reason you do it is because it is a strategic tool. It makes everyone think about ‘what will we need to do to be successful in five years?’ ” Welch is a big proponent of being open and flexible enough to make what he calls “wise course corrections.” He always reminds his staff that just because they assigned money to a project doesn’t mean they have to do the project. “Because the world is changing so rapidly, we need to be able to not make an investment we planned nine months ago,” says Welch, so they can “make an investment we never thought of nine months ago.”