The Law of Unpredictability - Law #17 under the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
“Unless you write your Competitor’s plans, you can’t predict the future”. You cannot predict the future but you can get a handle on trends and take advantage of change.
The law of Unpredictability can easily be considered as a clear continuation of the previous law ‘The Law of Singularity‘. Unless you do not know what plan your competitor is hatching, you won’t know how to tackle it when executed. It is always better to be a step ahead than your competition if you would want to stay as a leader in the market. It is not something new where corporations have hired private detectives to get hands on confidential strategic information of competitors in order to pre-empt their moves accordingly.
The more unpredictable your competitor is, the more unpredictable your leadership position in the market is. It is always better to have a team just to focus on the market, the competitors and their activities in order to build a good market intelligence that will save you misery in the future. All this years the corporations have been doing the same, either build a in-house marketing team or hire an agency that does the job for them. Irrespective of the engagement method, the results were based on the data collection methodology as the outcome of the research will only be as good as the data quality.
There is always a possibility that your competitor has analyzed the market better than your team has and therefore has started working on a product concept or has started implementing a new service in his line. It is not good to laugh at what your competitor who might be doing something totally unusual than the normal. It is important to start thinking in that direction to understand what might be the reason behind that move. The Law of Unpredictability is not only limited to the information pertaining to the competitor alone but to the market in general as well. There is a need to be far sighted and have a vision on the direction the market is heading and start preparation for the future market today.
Digital Media has made the marketer’s job so easy that they will have the information just by the click of a virtual button on their computer screen. There are tools that are available in the market that will collect the data from various data sources, do the collation, perform analysis and come out with meaningful reports. The problem with this is that the tools are available for whoever seeks the subscription, which means that the data you have will also be available to your competitors. However, the tool has some inbuilt reports but the information that one can get also depends on what the individual seeks. In other words, the tools are computer programs to import data, collate it and perform analysis based on the formulas defined earlier.
It now depends on what the marketer seeks to know from the data collected and therefore the report can be customized and hence may vary from individual to individual. Even if the reports are the same and information portrayed are the same, it depends on the individual as to what do they make out of it. It therefore is still anybody’s game but the process has become a lot more simpler due to Digital Media.
