This EIU Canback special report explains how Asia’s consumer landscape will evolve over the coming decade and how companies can capture growth by leveraging analytics to anticipate turning points such as ‘take-off’ or plateau points in the life cycle of a product category. (more…)

While we take a sharply analytical approach to quantify market opportunities for today and tomorrow, this alone is not sufficient to provide our clients with a comprehensive view of what is happening in those markets.

Canback consultants have therefore walked the ground in nearly 80 countries over the past ten years, in order to complement our quantitative expertise with an intimate understanding of the markets we visit.

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Most large U.S. fast-moving consumer goods companies find it difficult, if not impossible, to grow at the rate of the economy. One part of the solution is to premiumize and to move to a more organic or sustainable brand portfolio.

We thus constructed the “Whole Foods Test” to see if this is happening. Arguably, Whole Foods’ assortment shows where the FMCG market is heading, especially in food and beverage. What today is the territory for primarily higher income and better educated consumers, is tomorrow’s mainstream norm. (more…)

Before any Olympic Game, the media revel in doomsday prophecies that never materialize. Today, the day before the opening of the Rio games, we did a fact-based analysis of whether these Olympics will be troubled. We conclude they will be a success.

Cities, not countries, organize Olympic Games. We thus quantified the cities’ hosting ability from 1948 till 2016. Rio is at the lower end of the spectrum, but not glaringly so. (more…)

Over the years, we have worked on over 150 projects in the global alcoholic beverage industry. Here is an overview of our capabilities. (more…)

As part of a large research project to understand where leading edge cities are found in the U.S., we started with the more modest goal of finding buzz (sought after, wanted) cities.

We find that tourist destinations have the highest buzz factor, topped by Daytona Beach. Hipster cities also score high, like Portland, Oregon, Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin. At the bottom is Worcester, Massachusetts. (more…)

A decade ago, we published a monthly U.S. recession predictor based on the Fed’s term spread model. It correctly predicted a recession starting in late 2007.

We are now reviving the predictor. There is currently no sign of a coming recession. We’ll update it monthly. (more…)

This document gives an overview of the methods and credentials we have in the telecom sector. It demonstrates our global reach and the fact-based we take in telecom by leveraging predictive analytics. (more…)

When making cross-border capital allocation decisions, exchange rate movements can trip up good investments. Is it possible to predict currency movements? We give a cautious yes when the time horizon is 3-10 years, i.e. a strategic  outlook (as opposed to currency traders’ horizon of seconds to at most months). (more…)

There is much talk about the growth of the middle class globally. But few people know where it lives. We may believe it is large in China, but how large? We put together a simple country comparison using C-GIDD data. (more…)

The VRIO concept was introduced by Jay Barney in 1991. It is now the cornerstone of corporate strategy development. We apply it in our strategy work, and it is also the foundation for how we think about adding value to clients.

A resource like management consultants has to be valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized. (more…)

The highest quality food in the world is by any objective measure  French, and the ultimate arbiter of fine dining is Guide Michelin.

We used the guide’s global restaurant ranking for 2016 to statistically analyze which countries have the highest love of food and what drives gourmet dining. Belgium ranks first, Poland last, among the 25 countries. (more…)

Developing a strategy that creates a sustainable competitive advantage is a vexing task. Our approach combines the two dominant strands within strategic thinking: Structure-Conduct-Performance and the Resource-Based View. Our projects aim to build strategies that are VRIO–a central concept in modern strategy development theory. (more…)

Here is advice for current and future business analysts at large corporations or consulting firms.

Your most important goal should be to add value. This means thinking long and hard about whether you copy, tabulate or analyze information. Only analysis truly adds value. (more…)

The global luxury goods market has enjoyed spectacular growth over the past 30 years. We predict this will continue based on an analysis of luxury goods retail stores. We mapped Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Apple stores around the world by city. In total 2,176 luxury good / high fashion stores. (more…)

Highly profitable companies earning a very high return on capital should be viewed with skepticism. Why? Because they may not be maximizing shareholder value as they defend a high P/E ratio, and not capturing good, but lower P/E opportunities. Maximizing profitability is not the same as maximizing shareholder value. (more…)

We encounter statistical analysis errors all the time. Here are the most common ones we come across when reviewing third party reports, other consulting firms’ deliverables, market researchers, etc. (more…)

We took a look at which components of the global gross domestic product (sum of country GDP) have grown the fastest over the past 40 years. (more…)

Do recent foreign exchange gyrations spell the end of the world as we know it? Or are they just business as usual? We took a look using our FX Tool. For most countries the changes are normal, but the Eurozone, the U.S., India, Pakistan, Colombia, Russia, Ukraine, and many smaller countries now experience once in a generation gyrations. (more…)

How quickly should a category or brand grow to avoid standing still? It depends on how fast the relevant part of the population is growing. We updated (May 2015) our popular analysis and it now covers 2015-2025. India, Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Pakistan, Indonesia are the top 5 countries. (more…)

Making diversification decisions–be it brand extensions, introducing new products, or entering new geographic markets–is hard for large companies. Few new initiatives seem to add significant value compared to what already exists. Yet companies fade without renewal. (more…)

We have updated our short video showing our project locations and where we travel to. It shows why we call ourselves the world’s smallest global company. (go to video…)

C.K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, argued that poor people constitute a large market opportunity for global companies. We have always been uncomfortable with the idea, and decided to examine Prahalad’s numbers. (more…)

Analysts often include too many independent variables in their models to improve model quality and find statistical patterns. We demonstrate how this sometimes leads to inaccurate findings. (more…)

Linear regression is the most popular method to forecast demand, but it does not always give the best results. Using an example from the fast-moving consumer goods industry, we introduce what are often better alternatives and discuss how to measure predictive accuracy (and no, it is not R²). (more…)

Many executives look for a high R² to assess the quality of a regression analysis, but this is often a mistake. One common example that illustrates why, is the relationship between the stock market and GDP. Regressing the S&P 500 index against GDP, we get an R² of 0.99. (more…)

We developed an interactive chart to show how total alcohol consumption per capita and the main categories beer, spirits and wine have shifted over the past 40 years. It uses publicly available data from the WHO with some adjustments by us (notably China). (more…)

There are a wide variety of consumption patterns for fast-moving consumer goods around the world. What explains the differences in consumption levels among countries? And what are the implications for global businesses as they consider investing in different markets? (more…)

Around 1/3 of our work is M&A operational due diligence. It leverages predictive analytics, but goes much farther including commercial strategy development, functional skills assessments, and financial modeling. (more…)

See our video with the GDP of the world’s major cities in 2014. Bubble area is proportional to GDP. (go to video…)

Well, not Esperanto. If you want to be successful in international trade, which languages should you speak? One answer is, the languages of those doing the trading. (more…)

We took a long term look — years 1-2034 — at global income equality using the C-GIDD dataset. In line with other research, we found that inequality was more or less flat before the industrial revolution, rose sharply from around 1800 till 1980 and then started to decline, and is projected to decline further. (more…)

Data from C-GIDD have been purchased by companies from a wide range of industries since the database launched in 2008. Here are some of our repeat customers. (more…)

The television series “Upstairs Downstairs” was wildly popular in the 1970s. It depicts lives of the upper and lower classes in London around 1920. We took the concept and quantified where Upstairs and Downstairs people live today. Data are from C-GIDD. (more…)

Staffan’s long and deep experience in Africa was a foundation for this article by Nick Kusitch: Africans Open Fuller Wallets to the Future. It was the eighth most read article in yesterday’s NYT, showing how interested people are in African matters.

We are often cited in the press and in reports. Here are a few examples. (more…)

This seminal presentation by Staffan Canback is still valid, 23 years after it was created. It discusses basic managerial principles in an age of change, building on Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Henri Fayol, and of course Ronald Coase and chaos theory. (more…)

Country growth prospects change over time. We took a look at which countries today have higher or lower growth expectations compared to two years ago. (more…)

Since it’s publication in 1998, Staffan Canback’s article “The Logic of Management Consulting” has become the most cited academic paper about the industry. It discusses how management consulting should be defined, why it exists, its history, and where it may be heading. (more…)

Over the years, companies and managers have come to rely more and more on the Canback Global Income Distribution Database (C-GIDD). C-GIDD’s uniqueness lies in the quality and completeness of our GDP and income distribution data, which covers 212 countries, 694 subdivisions (states, provinces, etc.) and 997 major cities from 2000 till 2025. (more…)

We’re featured in the National Geographic November 2013 article “The War for Nigeria.” (more…)