Marketing intelligence

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Marketing intelligence (MI) is the everyday information relevant to a company's markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. Marketing intelligence is necessary when entering a foreign market.

Contents

Concept

Marketing intelligence determines the intelligence needed, collects it by searching the environment, and delivers it to marketing managers who need it. Marketing intelligence software can be deployed using an on-premises or software as a service (SaaS, or cloud-based) model. These systems take data from disparate data sources, like web analytics, business intelligence, call center, and sales data, which often come in separate reports, and put them into a single environment. In order to collect marketing intelligence, marketing managers must be in constant touch with relevant books, newspapers, and trade publications. They must talk to various stakeholders like customers, distributors, and suppliers. In addition to this, they must also monitor social media and carry out online discussions. Marketing managers can design reports that correlate and visualize data coming from a variety of departments and sources (even, in some cases, external data). This allows them to see current key performance indicators in real-time (or as quickly as sources provide data) and analyze trends, rather than wait for analysts to deliver periodic reports.

Marketing intelligence systems are designed to be used by marketing managers and are often viewed by employees throughout an organization. Notable systems on the market include Contify, Uptime, Leadtime, Pardot, Marketo, and Hubspot. They may have user interfaces that more closely resemble consumer software than the software around individual data sources, which are designed for use by analysts. Business intelligence, for example, can collect highly accurate, timely, granular data, but often requires IT support to build and edit custom reports.

Organizationally, marketing intelligence can be the name of the department that performs both the market intelligence and competitor analysis roles. Business intelligence of any kind may also be their responsibility, in tandem with (or solely performed by) the Finance department, for measuring market share and setting growth targets, the mergers and acquisitions group for exploring acquisition opportunities, the legal department to protect the organization's assets or research and development for cross-company comparison of innovation trends and the discovery of opportunities through innovative differentiation.

Steps

With the following steps being applied, a company's marketing intelligence system will prove to be beneficial to its effective functioning.

  1. Train and Motivate Sales Force: A company's sales force can be an excellent source of information about the current trends in the market. They are the "intelligence gatherers" for the company. The acquired facts can be regarding the company's market offerings, whether any improvements are required or not or is there any opportunity for new products, etc. It can also provide a credible source to know about competitor activities, consumers, distributors, and retailers.
  2. Motivate Distributors, retailers, and other intermediaries to pass along important intelligence: Specialists are hired by companies to gather marketing intelligence. In order to measure the quality of production, the way the employees are behaving with customers, quality of facilities being provided; retailers and service providers send mystery shoppers. Firms can also assess the quality of customer experience with the shops with the use of mystery shoppers.
  3. Network Externally: Every firm must keep a tab on its competitors. Competitive intelligence describes the broader discipline of researching, analyzing and formulating data and information from the entire competitive environment of any organization. This can be done by purchasing the competitor's products, checking the advertising campaigns, the press media coverage, reading their published reports, etc. Competitive intelligence must be legal and ethical.
  4. Set up a customer advisory panel: Companies can set up panels consisting of customers. They can be the company's largest customers or representatives of customers or the most outspoken customers. Many business schools set up panels of alumni who provide their knowledge and expertise and help constitute the course curriculum.
  5. Optimal usage of Government data resources: Governments of almost all countries publish reports regarding population trends, demographic characteristics, agricultural production, and a lot of other such data. All this data must be or can be referred to as base data. It can help in planning and formulating policies for the companies.
  6. Information bought from external suppliers: Certain agencies sell data that can be useful to other companies. For example, television channels will require information on the viewership, ratings of TV programs, etc. An agency that calculates this information and generates this data will provide it to companies that need it.
  7. Collect Competitive Intelligence through online customer feedback: The customer's view of a product is essential for any company. Ultimately it's the customer who's buying the product. Hence customer feedback must be taken. Online platforms like chat rooms, blogs, discussion forums, and customer review boards can be used to generate customer feedback. This enables the firm to understand customer experiences and impressions. It becomes easier for companies to apply a structured system to do so as it can then scan out the relevant messages without much trouble.

See also

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.

A management information system (MIS) is an information system used for decision-making, and for the coordination, control, analysis, and visualization of information in an organization. The study of the management information systems involves people, processes and technology in an organizational context.

Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ensuring that a product meets the needs of its target market and contributes to the business strategy, while managing a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Software product management adapts the fundamentals of product management for digital products.

Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.

Competitive analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling combines all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.

Marketing strategy is an organization's promotional efforts to allocate its resources across a wide range of platforms, channels to increase its sales and achieve sustainable competitive advantage within its corresponding market.

In strategic management, situation analysis refers to a collection of methods that managers use to analyze an organization's internal and external environment to understand the organization's capabilities, customers, and business environment. The situation analysis can include several methods of analysis such as the 5C analysis, SWOT analysis and Porter's five forces analysis.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. It involves the systematic collection and analysis of information from multiple sources, and a coordinated CI program. It is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in strategic decision making for an organization.

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators. EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer-specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Commercial intelligence is a form of open-source intelligence practiced by diverse international and local businesses. Business Intelligence is a misnomer for data mining and enterprise dashboards that present useful patterns or distillations of internal information to the executive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Market share</span> Relative market adoption

Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a 10 percent share in that market.

A market analysis studies the attractiveness and the dynamics of a special market within a special industry. It is part of the industry analysis and thus in turn of the global environmental analysis. Through all of these analyses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of a company can be identified. Finally, with the help of a SWOT analysis, adequate business strategies of a company will be defined. The market analysis is also known as a documented investigation of a market that is used to inform a firm's planning activities, particularly around decisions of inventory, purchase, work force expansion/contraction, facility expansion, purchases of capital equipment, promotional activities, and many other aspects of a company.

Revenue management is the application of disciplined analytics that predict consumer behaviour at the micro-market levels and optimize product availability, leveraging price elasticity to maximize revenue growth and thereby, profit. The primary aim of revenue management is selling the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price and with the right pack. The essence of this discipline is in understanding customers' perception of product value and accurately aligning product prices, placement and availability with each customer segment.

Market environment and business environment are marketing terms that refer to factors and forces that affect a firm's ability to build and maintain successful customer relationships. The business environment has been defined as "the totality of physical and social factors that are taken directly into consideration in the decision-making behaviour of individuals in the organisation."

Product Planning, or product discovery, is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product's feature set. It serves as the basis for decision-making about price, distribution and promotion. Product planning is also the means by which companies and businesses can respond to long-term challenges within the business environment, often achieved by managing the product throughout its life cycle using various marketing strategies, including product extensions or improvements, increased distribution, price changes and promotions. It involves understanding the needs and wants of core customer groups so products can target key customer desires and allows a firm to predict how a product will be received within a market upon launch.

A marketing information system (MIS) is a management information system (MIS) designed to support marketing decision making. Jobber (2007) defines it as a "system in which marketing data is formally gathered, stored, analysed and distributed to managers in accordance with their informational needs on a regular basis." In addition, the online business dictionary defines Marketing Information System (MKIS) as "a system that analyzes and assesses marketing information, gathered continuously from sources inside and outside an organization or a store." Furthermore, "an overall Marketing Information System can be defined as a set structure of procedures and methods for the regular, planned collection, analysis and presentation of information for use in making marketing decisions."

Market intelligence (MI) is gathering and analyzing information relevant to a company's market - trends, competitor and customer monitoring. It is a subtype of competitive intelligence (CI), which is data and information gathered by companies that provide continuous insight into market trends such as competitors' and customers' values and preferences.

The fields of marketing and artificial intelligence converge in systems which assist in areas such as market forecasting, and automation of processes and decision making, along with increased efficiency of tasks which would usually be performed by humans. The science behind these systems can be explained through neural networks and expert systems, computer programs that process input and provide valuable output for marketers.

Data-driven marketing is a process used by marketers to gain insights and identify trends about consumers and how they behave — what they buy, the effectiveness of ads, and how they browse. Modern solutions rely on big data strategies and collect information about consumer interactions and engagements to generate predictions about future behaviors. This kind of analysis involves understanding the data that is already present, the data that can be acquired, and how to organize, analyze, and apply that data to better marketing efforts. The intended goal is generally to enhance and personalize the customer experience. The market research allows for a comprehensive study of preferences.

References

Forrester Report on New Tech - Market and Competitive Intelligence Solutions, Q1 2019

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