I go into a Walmart and see a bookshelf full of romance novels and religious books.
I walk into a Fred Meyer and not only do they have those same romance novels they also have an entire bookshelf dedicated to sci fi and fantasy! With books such as!
Why does Walmart stereotype its clientele as the people who would never read works such as these? Why would it be a bad thing if a poor religious person picked up a sci fi or fantasy novel?
Why does Walmart stereotype its clientele as the people who would never read works such as these?
Walmart does not "stereotype" their customers. What Walmart, like all highly successful businesses, does is perform quantitative analysis ("quant") on their sales. If that analysis shows that sci-fi novels don't produce the return the firm desires, they reduce or eliminate the allocation of "floor space" given to sci-fi novels and provide it to something else, be it romance novels or feather dusters or whatever.
"Quant" is a tool used by retailers to evaluate just about everything, which is to say marketing strategy, marketing mix analysis, pricing, promotion, distribution, and product policy. Moreover, marketing decision making is not the only firm function facilitated by "quant;" nearly every upper-level aspect of management, financing/investing, and operations decision making is both measured and guided by it.
Successful businesses don't care who their customers are, they care that they understand their current and potential customers. "Quant" enables businesses to understand how their customers
have behaved. "Quant" is complemented by qualitative analysis, which is a subjective (but not at all haphazard) analytical technique that provides insights into why they behave(-ed) as they do/did, why they might behave differently, when they are likely to do so, and what catalysts (internal to the firm or external to it) motivate customers to change (or not) their buying behavior in the future.
Do quantitative and qualitative analysis yield perfect information and results? No, but neither do they need to. They need only produce better decision support than one would have absent them. In short, when people talk about there being a "business case" for "X," what they mean is that based on the rigorous and sound empirical and subjective analysis they've performed, "X" is the best decision available and that aligns with a firm's goals and tolerance for risk.
