s, 1988b). The company specializes in soft goods clothing, accessories, and housewares for the entire family. The slogan "the customer comes first" is a byword in Mervyn's sales effort.
Mervyn's permits store managers and merchandise managers to alter merchandise mixes to respond to local needs and pre ferences. To the maximum extent possible, however, buying is centralized for the chain. Merchandise managers exercise pri mary responsibility for inventory management and control. It is their responsibility to insure that merchandise is turned, before it becomes unsaleable, as a result of damage, 3obsolescence, or loss of style demand. Store managers exer cise a secondary responsibility in this area.
All organizations have a need to know what demands will be placed upon them by the clientele they serve. Their precise information needs with respect to the development of market forecasts depend, to a great extent, on the approach taken by the organization, in the development of marketing objectives.
At Mervyn's, marketing objectives are developed within the context of the marketing concept. This concept "holds that the key task of the organization is to determine the needs and wants of target markets and to adapt the organization to deli vering the desired satisfactions more effectively and effic iently than its competitors" (Kotler, 1987, p. 31).
A forecast is an estimate of the level of demand for a product or for several products for some period of time in the future (Biegel, 1986). In the case of sales forecasting, the demand projected is that of a firm's customers for the products that the firm produces or markets.
To be meaningful, forecasts must project demand in terms of measurable units of a product. The best forecasts are those developed through the application of statistical procedures. Within this framework, Mervyn's employs a combination of trend line projections, and cyclic demand projectio...