What is Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing Intelligence refers to all of the information relevant to a company’s market(s) or target market(s) that the company can use to make more effective decisions about their participation and particular role within one or more markets.
This intelligence is acquired through market research.
At the global level, the outcome of this research is invaluable in understanding what exactly will help a company be most successful in the global marketplace.
4 Areas of Market Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence: compiling data about competitors to (1) gain insight into the direction of competitors’ upcoming products and services and (2) create future business strategies
Product Intelligence: evaluating an organization’s own products/services and comparing them to competing products/services in the market to make changes that will maximize the value the organization’s product/service gives its users
Market Understanding: collecting data and making observations to figure out which customers are the most active and where in the market they are most active to position a product or service there
Customer Intelligence: identifying who an organization’s current clients are, who its best clients are (within that group), these clients’ demographics and opinions of the brand, and past customer experience
Steps to Engage in Market Intelligence
- Identify and define one or more problems to direct research
- These problems allow market research to be focused rather than lead to the collection of general data
- Focused market research, in turn, can help a company develop focused solutions with a higher likelihood of success
- Create a research design
- Research methods are the strategies used to implement a research design and can be applied more effectively to research questions with help of a research plan
- Collect primary and secondary data
- Secondary data: data that already exists
- Primary data: data collected by a companies to fill in the gaps of lacking secondary data
- Analyze all collected data and interpret data results
- Data by itself is hardly useful if the company cannot understand its implications
- Once this understanding is reached, a company can use this data to answer its research questions
- Present findings from the data
- Presenting the data carves out opportunities for making adjustments to current marketing strategies and implementing new ones
Market Intelligence Does Not Guarantee the Future
Though market research is one of the primary tools used to make decisions for the future, it cannot predict the future. Rather, market intelligence can only tell a company about what is true today.
As such, companies should take market intelligence with a grain of salt.
Still, using market intelligence to inform decision making is proven to improve an organization’s chances at future success, so companies should treat engage in market research and treat market intelligence as what it is: an incredibly useful tool, not a crystal ball.