How Hits Happen: Forecasting Predictability in a Chaotic Marketplace - Softcover

Farrell, Winslow

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752820958 ISBN 13: 9780752820958

Publisher: Orion Business (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ), 1998

Synopsis

A powerful new business tool to enable you to identify, capture and sustain the forces that lead to 'hits' in the market. What makes a hit, a hit? How does a movie like Titanic captivate the public's eye - and break box office records worldwide? What set the Spice Girls apart from the countless other bands struggling to make it big.? What forces thrust Captain Corelli's Mandolin to the top of the bestsellers book chart and enabled it to remain there for months? Just how do hits' happen? In this book, leading market consultant Winslow Farrell offers a breakthrough approach uncovering the hidden patterns behind hits.Applying Complexity theory - the science that examines the interactions of various factors in complex systems - to modern businessproblems, Farrell sheds light on the intricate world of consumer behaviour. In doing so, he helps managers to identify the emerging patterns and forces that lead to a hit and the triggers that will enable business es to capture and sustain that hit.

About this title

Review

How is it that certain sites become the superstars of the World Wide Web? What makes Internet-based stores and services, for example America Online, burst into public consciousness? Farrell explains that the process is the same as the one which took Hootie and the Blowfish from bar band to supergroup at record speed or made Beanie Babies a national craze.

Farrell shows how social interactions create hits, both on and offline. Better yet, he demonstrates how computer models are using the mathematics of complexity theory to help predict the hit or flop potential of new ideas, products, and services. What makes the models so fascinating is that they behave as groups of individual consumers, running in simulated communities inside the computer, approximating the reactions of their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

While the principles here apply to the entire world of business, they are particularly important for those who wish to create an audience or customer base on the Internet, where the hit-creating (and -preventing) forces seem to be particularly volatile. And while Farrell makes it clear that hits cannot be manufactured on demand, he is able to provide good advice on tactics which can swing the odds more in your favour. --Elizabeth Lewis, Amazon.com

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion Business (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0752820958
• ISBN 13: 9780752820958
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256