It is often the case that marketers want to know what products and services their target customers are planning to buy. This is almost always measured by surveys which are given to respondents simply asking them "are you planning on buying (or how likely are you to buy) this product in the next x months?" While the question is simple and clear, panel data has shown that people's answers to these types of questions can be terribly inaccurate. For example, it is not uncommon for a firm to get research results which say that 40% of the target market plans on buying the product in the next 6 months, but only 5% actually do. This raises a number of questions. Primarily, what is the point of getting this research data at all? Do you as a future (or current) manager see any value in such data that has consistently proven to be unreliable? Why or why not? Also, why is it that people are so bad at predicting which products they are going to buy and when? Do you think that people are just generally bad at predicting their own behavior or is predicting purchasing behavior a special case that people are particularly poor at? Why?