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The purpose of this thesis is to expand the current fashion forecasting methodology by applying a strategic planning and forecasting technique called scenario planning (also referred to as the “Shell Method”) to fashion forecasting. In traditional fashion forecasting, Practitioners have relied on methods that primarily focus on arriving at one “official future.” This official future is created by discovering innovations (gained through historical and current analysis), applying them to fashion frameworks and then interpreting them in a future context. In some cases, forecasters may allow for more than one future, but it is still generally circumscribed around a single future with variations of good/better/best or perhaps best case/worst case scenarios. The method of scenario planning offers opportunities to better address the complexity of the external environment of the fashion world, to challenge the mental models of fashion forecasters and fashion industry professionals, and to help fashion businesses anticipate change and manage risk in an uncertain world. Scenario planning is the beginning of a larger strategic conversation that creates a common language among participants and most importantly it relies on the creation of multiple divergent futures or scenarios. Once developed, the narratives of the scenarios are richly fleshed out allowing you to literally “live” in a projected future and to test your strategies or concepts for “robustness” and “resiliency.” This thesis: 1. provides an overview of fashion forecasting and scenario planning techniques; 2. examines the similarities between the two processes; 3. determines how the two methodologies diverge in practice; 4. outlines which tools used by fashion forecasters could be easily adapted to the scenario planning process and what fashion forecasters need to add to their repertoire in order to utilize scenario planning; 5. proposes how scenario planning could be applied to fashion forecasting and what some of those specific applications might be; 6. outlines the general difficulties of scenario planning and determines how those would relate specifically to the fashion industry; 7. and in conclusion, creates a case for utilizing scenario planning in fashion forecasting by emphasizing the benefits of scenario planning. |
