Several businesses across the world will have marked last Friday – the 31^st of March – as the last day of their financial year. Heads of sales, strategy and finance, and management teams of corporations will spend many hours over the next few weeks dissecting their year’s performance. How accurate were the industry-wide demand forecasts? Was the strategy team able to predict the likelihood of a disruption of some sort in the industry? Did they expect consumer behaviour to change so drastically in a year?

For businesses of all kinds, yesterday’s success is history. What matters is the future. As a result, competitive and market intelligence analysts are routinely tasked with forecasting market (or product) growth. Very often, business plans are built on such forecasts. But if you ask the users of these estimates, there is more than a healthy scepticism. After all, who can predict the future?

These days it appears next to impossible to ignore big data and analytics. When we’re stumped, big data will tell us what to do. And if big data doesn’t have the answer, we can look at “small” data! We will make better marketing decisions, acquire more customers, improve profitability, and beat the pants off competition. Is this real, or hype promoted by people who want to sell us expensive hardware, software or services? The answer is in between.