What is meant by Comparative Analysis and Market Estimation by Analogy? How can these be helpful in marketing research?

What will be an ideal response?

In global marketing research, it may be necessary to conduct comparisons of market potential and marketing performance in different countries or regional markets at the same point in time. This analysis can be intra-company or cross-national comparison. There may be differences even under similar conditions from one country to another. For example, catalog sales in the United States represent about 3% of overall retail sales. By comparison, catalog sales in Germany account for 5.8% of overall sales. This suggests that there is a catalog marketing opportunity in Germany. Sometimes data may not be available for a particular country or regional market. In such cases it is sometimes possible to draw an analogy. In other words the comparison is based on partial resemblance since data are not available. Time-series displacement is an analogy technique based on the assumption that an analogy between markets exists in different time periods. The time displacement method requires a marketer to estimate when two markets are at similar stages of development.