Post by Schulich School of Business - York University

Historically, humans have relied on the mystical to try and peer through the fog of years. Oracles, prophets, astrologers and fortune-tellers used to do a brisk business when it came to predicting (hopeful) futures. Modernity largely replaced the metaphysical, and predictions of the future soon shifted toward a future centred around the technological, with unbridled optimistic visions of progress and innovation being presented in popular culture via magazines and speculative fiction. Predictions are now much more prosaic, with Big Data and digital analytics leading the charge as the main tools used for predictions of consumer sentiment and consumer trends. On social media, the art of predictions (or, rather, “forecasting”) often take the form of combining multiple data streams to determine if a movie will be successful or not, or a candidate will win an election – but, often, these predictive models lack the nuances to allow for deeper levels of understanding of consumer sentiment, with polarized (and competing) conversations tending to cause certain, more exciting and optimistic, predictions rise to the top. A new paper co-authored by Schulich School of Business - York University Professor Russell Belk (Professor of Marketing & Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing) and colleagues suggests that an approach to understanding (rather than predicting) the future lies in the practice of “Netnography”, which studies naturally occurring online cultural conversations on the internet and social media. Belk and his coauthors maintain that netnography offers a deeper, more culturally sensitive, qualitative analysis of social media content than standard analytical approach offered by Big Data–– not just as a passive tool to understand how future trends may form and emerge, but also how they may affect the future via “visioneering.” Read about history of predicting the future and find out the eight ways that netnography can help marketers *shape and make sense of* the future in “Yes, but…: Technology, netnography, and futures” at https://lnkd.in/eaGes7Hh #SchulichResearch #Research #Netnography #Prediction #DigitalCommunities #OnlineCommunities #ConsumerSentiment