Forecasting is predicting future outcomes and is important for business planning and decision making. There are different types of forecasting, including product forecasting which predicts success based on awareness, distribution, price and needs, trend estimation which analyzes trends over time, and technology forecasting which predicts the development of technologies. To determine the best forecasting method, a firm can analyze methods used by similar companies and modify them, or test several methods and select the one that works best with their available data and produces the strongest results.