Knowledge is power goes the saying.

In which case, our industry is still in the dark ages when it comes to meaningful and authoritative annual data about the size and content of the market we serve.

There used to be an organisation called the British Lawnmower Manufacturers Federation (BLMF) which collated data about mower sales. You can understand why that body no longer exists, but one of its role was to collate and publish annual data on the ebbs and flow of the market, category by category.  

It got the agreement of its members to confidentially share their sales figures to a central source – and publish the composite result.

Now there was two flaws. One that the data reflected sales into retailers, not sales made to consumers. Two that the major players at the time, Flymo and Qualcast were going to head to head (we are talking about the late 1980s, early 1990s) - and they used their interpretation of the BLMF figures to support claims of market leadership.

The ideal format, and the one which the BLMF tried to implement was that sales in, were then compared with the data supplied by the major consumer audit companies who track sales from both mass trade and a cross section of independent retailers.

The only products within our sector that can be accurately tracked are agricultural tractors, most of which have to be licenced for the road - and that data is routinely released by the AEA. 

However, we are in the dark about the actual market size of the most of the products we handle. How many ATV’s are sold during the year? Zero turn mowers? Chainsaws? Lawn tractors? Cylinder mowers?

The AEA does a good job in providing an overview, particularly of the agricultural market on its website. Tractors can be counted and other products such as combines total 700 - 800 annually so are relatively easy to track. But I guess that even the AEA would concede that there are a number of caveats in their estimates.

Of course, it gets much more difficult when it comes to volume selling products - and is getting no easier with internet sales and own labels products.

Is all this important?  Each manufacturer or supplier know what they are selling - and who they are selling to. Each dealer knows what he or she is selling. Everyone takes an educated guess on the size of the market. But it is trends we are after.

In an ideal world, we would know that sales of say, zero-turn mowers, soared or bombed in 2015.  But such information can only be gathered by taking data from a cross section of retailers – and as we know from the experiences of the pollsters before the General Election last May, such methodology can be suspect!

However, annual sales data by product group collated from a carefully selected nationwide panel of dealers, representative of franchises and size of business could form the basis of an annual market report which has both substance and credibility.