Talk:Market share

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics articles	WikiProject Economics	(Rated Stub-Class)
	Business and economics portal v • d • e This article is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.  Stub  This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale.  ???  This article has not yet received a rating on the project's priority scale.

==

You are right that it is very difficult to calculate market share with certainty. However all but the smallest business do it. It usually involves obtaining industry sales figures from trade associations or commercial data suppliers, then dividing your own sales figures by this number. To get an idea how ubiquitous it is look at all the media and advertising ratings calculations. These are all variants of market share calculations. Or talk to any stock analyst: They will know the SOM of all the companies they track. You are correct that there are many other objectives being used. A while back I saw a textbook that listed two and a half pages of them. And we have to keep in mind that companies typically use multiple objectives. This is because there are several types of objectives each applicable in its own area. For example, there are financial objectives, tactical objectives, strategic objectives (of which market share is one of the most important), short term objectives, long-term objectives, corporate level objectives, business level objectives, operational level objectives, etc. mydogategodshat 08:01, 12 May 2004 (UTC)