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Hey everyone:
So today I received an email from a potential employer, who, after seeing my resume, decides to ask me a marketing question to test my creativity, as follows:
"Assume you have access to any data from any online website or platform, describe how you would forecast the top 3 selling cars in Canada this summer without the use of surveys." Feel free to describe any technique or processes you would use or what would be the ideal data.
IMO, given the recent environmental crisis around the world (U.S oil spill, Earthquake in Japan and its consequent nuclear meltdown) and the rising oil prices, I would predict that people would start buying environmentally-friendly cars that are efficient.
That was just a quick 5-minute brainstorming I did during my break between classes. What do you guys think? I think my response above does however lack some creativity; maybe I should consider more factors as well as the actual process of data-collecting. What would be the ideal sample of data?
Can you guys give me some tips or suggestions on this? Meanwhile I'm gonna look for other creative ways to answer this.
Cheers!
 
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That's an obvious answer. If they're testing your creativity, you need to be creative..... Think of some factors that others won't think of.
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That's a fairly vague question.
As much as you can cast a broad stroke around eco-friendly/efficient cars, you also have to look at past results, and the market. Demographics play a huge role as well.
You have Google results, Facebook/social media....I'd ask for clarification first. Wholly inefficient question or gauge of anything without specificity.
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Best of luck to you with the job! Hopefully you'll get it. 
But yeah I'd be inclined to agree not just due to the crisis in Japan and Libya but also because oil is becoming more and more scarce in general. It's basically an hourglass the oil tycoons are putting off til' the last grain and by then it's going to be a little bit too late It's getting really close to that time for consumers and manufacturers to start worrying about widespread adoption of electrical cars or some other means of alternative power for vehicles in a widespread respect. The oil and world's patience is running out. 
I think you are on the right track though, best of wishes with the employers!
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Any data at all?
You'll want to look at Google searches and YouTube searches. You have an amount of data that most marketing people can only dream of. Look at recent trends in, well, everything.
The example you came up with does not use the information at all. Perhaps you could check the databases of a car magazine and pull the top 3 most read reviews.
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Wow, good one. Hope you get the job.
But, the condition of having access to any website or plattaform it's nearly ridiculous and simplifies too much your task.
That condition would allow you to ask without explicitly ask (as in a survey) for your customers preferences, just doing a meta-analysis of that data.
My answer would be that you can't be JUST creative, part of the endeavor of make people buy your stuff is knowing what flaws on your predictions could exist. I think that you should narrow your population and look at their characteristics. You need to first know WHO is going to buy a car, and the relate their characteristics to the car they probably want.
But thats one side of the problem. We know we're not rational, so there's many tricks one seller could do to makes us buy cars. I recomend you to read about behavioral economics instead of consumer psychology.
gL
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Do you only look at the consumer? If not, I suggest you look at how all these events affect the manufacturer/distributors and how that would affect the market. You can't buy eco-cars if they're not being sold. When you mentioned the Japan Earthquake, the first thing that came to mind is that Japanese car manufacturers have closed their plants in Japan. At least in Canada, eco-cars are associated with Japanese cars usually so consumers in Canada won't be jumping to buy eco-cars anytime soon unless our views on American cars changes.
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EPT
