What Market Intelligence system? Benefits, Elements, Purpose

What Market Intelligence System?

Market Intelligence System one that systematically gathers and processes critical business information, transforming it into actionable management intelligence for marketing decisions in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. The system designed to be used by marketing managers and often viewed by employees throughout an organization.

• Market intelligence is a broadened concept it is not just about market information, but the whole gamut of external environment information gathered by looking at secondary information sources usually through a continuous monitoring process. Further, this will help needed to support key strategic decisions – about products, prices, investment priorities, entering joint ventures etc.
  
  
• Business intelligence system is not only a computer-based system. But it is a total system which incorporates human processes for interpreting and processing information into intelligence.
  
  
• Marketing intelligence must be systematized processes since only regular monitoring of key external parameters and integration of disparate snippets of information will give a viable long-term intelligence base.

Steps to be taken for improving marketing intelligence

1. Train and Motivate Sales Force: Provide a current excellent source of information about the current trends in the market and obtain facts regarding the company’s market offerings wheather any improvements are required or not or is there any opportunity for new products.
   
   
2. Motivate Distributors and other intermediaries to pass along important intelligence: The firms hired specialists for measure the quality of production and the way the employees are behaving with customers, quality of facility being provided.
   
   
3. Network Externally: For gathering important information every firm must keep a tab on its competitors. This can be done by describes the broader discipline of researching, analyzing and formulating data and information from the entire competitive environment of any organization.
   
   
4. Set up a customer advisory panel: They are the company’s largest customers or representatives of the firm or the most outspoken customers.
   
   
5. Optimal usage of Government data resources: Governments publish reports regarding the population trends, demographic characteristics, agricultural production and a lot of other such data. This data can be referred to as base data and that can helpful in planning and formulating policies for the companies.
   
   
6. Information bought from external suppliers: Many of the agencies sell data that can be useful to other companies.
   
   
7. Collect Competitive Intelligence through online customer feedback: A view about product and services is essential. Now a day’s firms taken feedback by online platforms like chat rooms hat rooms, blogs, discussion forums, customer review boards etc.

Benefits of Market Intelligence

• Market and customer orientation- executing a marketing intelligence will encourage people throughout the organisation to focus externally. Ø Identification of new opportunities
  
• Early warning of competitor moves – through good intelligence,
  
• Minimizing investment risk-
  
• Better customer interaction-
  
• Better market selection & positioning- understand where your offer fits and discover untapped or under-served potential
  
• Quicker, more efficient and cost-effective information- avoid duplication of report acquisitions and expensive consultant work

Key Elements of Market Intelligence

Information

Gathering information used by a company for the purposes of decision-making, but is likely to refer to data concerning to the company itself, rather than its market environment.

A continuous process of flow of information is the support of a good market intelligence system – information about economics trend of the country, new technologies, markets and the regulatory authorities of the company etc.

Information Management Processes

Information Management Processes is uses to acquire or retrieve, organise and maintain information. The information which is holds by firms will be complex and come from a variety of different sources. This can be challenging for firm to managing this data consistently across multiple departments.

A good information management process will enable you to recognize the value of your organisation’s data and identify gaps or problems with your data quality. The conceptualization of information management as a set of inter-related information behavior to be planned for, designed, and coordinated, give a process-based point of view that complements the more natural views of information management.

With many professionals having external information delivered to their desktops, from online services and increasingly from the Internet is easy to believe that users have all the information they need on tap.

However, this is raw information and will need transforming into intelligence. Before that, however, this information must be classified, stored and made accessible.

There are ten key points to ensure that information management activities are effective and successful:

1. Recognize (and manage) complexity
2. Focus on adoption
3. Deliver tangible & visible benefits
4. Prioritise according to business needs
5. Take a journey of a thousand steps
6. Provide strong leadership
7. Mitigate risks
8. Communicate extensively
9. Aim to deliver a seamless user experience
10. Choose the first project very carefully

Intelligence Development Processes

A good intelligence system is more than information. It is a recurring cycle of linking the needs of decision makers to the processes of turning the information into actionable intelligence.

Purposes of Market Intelligence

Market intelligence is use to assist with more or less every decision faced by a company. It helps to firm to grow by increase profit, revenue, or market share. A good implementation of market intelligence which has been correctly inferred can have a huge return on investment.

• Help enter a new market or expand presence in a market
• Minimize the risk of an investment decision being wrong
• Keep ahead of the competition, obtain a first-mover advantage over competitors
• Give the customers what they want, expand market share
• Establish and maintain a distinctive corporate identity
• Tailor products and marketing effort around customer needs

Market entry and market expansion studies

The gathering of information according to the objectives of the intelligence will inform a decision to invest in a new market, or simply to increase investment in an existing market, the market research and intelligence firm would gather information from the following sources:

• Potential buyers– to find out how much demand there is for the product/service
  
  
• Distributors, agents and other intermediaries– to find out how to best get products and services to market, and again to ascertain how much demand there is for the product/service
  
  
• Competitors– to find out how other companies have successfully entered and stayed in the market, and judge the market’s likely response to a new entrant.
  
  
• Industry experts such as journalists and industry associations: these organizations can frequently provide a quick and concise overview of the market, as well as numerous leads in the form of contact details of market players