What is Market & Competitive Intelligence

Successful business planning and development requires a good understanding of market potential, and of your capabilities against those of your competitors.

Yet, 92% of respondents in a US survey felt that they needed a more systematic approach to competitor intelligence, while 75% of respondents in a UK survey were dissatisfied with their current methods of organising marketing information. What these organisations lack is effective Market Intelligence Systems and Processes.

If you want to know if you should invest in time and thought to find out whether Market & Competitive Intelligence could add value to your business, ask yourself the following simple questions. Your own answers will provide insight into your room for improvement for active business intelligence:

1. Determine Demand for Market & Competitive Intelligence

What do we need to know in order to make decisions?
How will this information be used?
What questions or problems will it help us solve?
Who needs the information?

2. Market & Competitive Intelligence Supply Situation

How do we gather data?
What are the reporting and analytical processes?

3. Application, Implementation of Market & Competitive Intelligence

What do you do differently as a result of this information?
What type of value can we achieve from using this information?

A Marketing Intelligence System is one that systematically gathers and processes critical business information, transforming it into actionable management intelligence for marketing decisions. What it all boils down to is this: will your company or organization be able to efficiently, quickly and completely understand market opportunities or threats and react successfully and timely to create maximum business impact?

MarkIntell.com provides comprehensive insight into all market and business intelligence disciplines with free articles, tutorials and editorials crafted by intelligence professionals across all industries and market segments.

Also intelligence partners and professional analysts discuss openly intelligence tactics, strategies and share operational experience in our intelligence forum and the intelligence web log journals with our active atoms, rss or rdf news reader feeds to keep you updated.

Establish a Market & Competitive Intelligence Function in your Organization

Understand WHAT and HOW your customers will decide TOMORROW! Business Intelligence is invaluable to understand your opportunities. This article guides you through the systematic approach of recognizing your organization’s specific intelligence needs, setting the framework of a strong market & competitive intelligence function and finally to implement necessary steps and elements for an intelligence units that should add sustained value to the businesses bottom line.

In this article by Jens Thieme, published at work.com, you can find valid asnwers to build and establish a competitive intelligence function in your organization. Here are some quotes from the original article:

“…Preparing for a step change of an entire organization is to be taken very seriously. The more professional you work, the more support you could gather early on, the more hard facts you can present if questions arsise, the more easier you can create and enjoy buy-in further down the road…”

“…After recognizing and fine-tuning the potential impact for your company or organization it is time to flesh out clear benefits to start creating buy-in. Don’t underestimate the motivational impact of professional intelligence, easily digestible and transformed into actionable sales goals settings and marketing target developments. Your sales force and marketing staff will be thrilled with excitement if opportunities become transparent on a constant basis…”

“…As with any other objective, if benefits are clearly based on real requirements it should be fairly straight forward to define the goals: simply by translating benefits into them…”

“…Every business process, tool or structure can only deliver benefits and value when properly implemented. Market & Competitive Intelligence processes and tools are no different and thus a great deal of resource and effort is to be allocated to the preparation and the actual process of implementation…”

“…Mostly driven by informal efforts, support gathering and coaching of processes and tools, the internal promotion for the business intelligence functions benefits should put user requirements into the center of activities. Meaning: scenarios, based on real world examples could be presented by sales managers or marketers themselves both in person and in writing. Testimonials and supportive statements by top management can be very intriguing to the targeted internal audience…”

You can find the entire article here: Guide to Establish a Market & Competitive Intelligence Function in your Organization by Jens Thieme

Whether you are about to build-up a market intelligence unit or want to deepen your understanding of state-of-the-art and best-practice market and competition intelligence, you will find rich resources for just about any intelligence needs.

MarkIntell.com offers free access to intelligence theory and advice, web logs maintained by intelligence professionals, discussion forums covering all areas of professional market intelligence and document exchange where you can equip yourself with presentations and demonstrations of industry-leading intelligence work.

We also provide links and partnerships with leaders of the intelligence and marketing consultancy industries world-wide.

As a member you will be granted access to the entire array of services and features including the ability to actively edit site content and downloading documents.

We are grateful and glad about any contribution that sticks to our forum and interaction rules. We reserve the right to remove any spam content and ban such “contributors” recognized by several mechanisms including origin IP address.

Thank you for your interest and participation in market and business intelligence. This resource goes way beyond marketing and sales although marketing serves as the backbone of any market intelligence effort. Feel free to request topic and content additions and add content and discussions yourself that you find important to the cause. Thank you!

The owner and author of MarkIntell.com (Jens Thieme) is Market & Competitive Intelligence Director of a global chemicals company.

Author: Jens Thieme

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