X-Message-Number: 5330
From:  (David Stodolsky)
Subject: Re: Rate of growth of cryonics
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 95 16:23:54 +0100

In Regards to your letter <>:
> And it seems to me that since we HAVE past records of the growth of cryonics,
> it would be foolish not to use them to make such an estimate. I even pointed

We need data collected in a standardized way to get beyond guesstimates.
There are many types of growth, and some can be used to predict others,
or detect that something basic is changing or that a particular marketing
mechanism is actually having an effect. With exponential growth any
market plan can seem "successful", even if it has no real effect.

Growth data should be collected on information requests, sign-up paperwork

requests, subscriptions to mags, and actually suspensions, etc. Basis 
demographic
data for each of these, such as age and sex, would be valuable to
see when some new population is getting interested and to see if this
interest follows through to sign-ups. Media exposures that could produce
these statistics should also be registered.

If this data becomes available, I would be happy to run an analysis.

Overhead has dominated the expenses of cryonics organizations up until
now. If growth is exponential, this will shift to a situation where
capacity becomes a limit, and organizations may be caught in cash
flow crunch, where they cannot meet demand. Any advanced warning of
this would be extremely valuable and perhaps crucial to maintaining
a good reputation for the movement.

Price points also need to be set with some idea of latent demand,
otherwise pricing policies may themselves limit the growth rate.
I has been suggested that in the limit, cost of LN is the dominate
expense associated with suspension. If this is anywhere near correct,
then it could be argued that during a period of rapid growth pricing
based upon current income-expenditure should predict a loss. This
would produce higher growth rates, assuming price-demand elasticity.
It may well be that the extreme fiscal conservatism of cryonics organizations,
which assume no growth, is a major growth inhibitor.

I don't see any way of making reasonable predictions/decisions unless
reasonably solid growth estimates are fed into cash-flow models.

dss

David S. Stodolsky      Euromath Center     University of Copenhagen
   Tel.: +45 38 33 03 30   Fax: +45 38 33 88 80 (C)


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