Q.
a) State the goal of 'Marketing Intelligence'. (5 marks)
b) Discuss the general steps involved in conducting market research for a proposed property development scheme. (20 marks)
(25 marks, 2014 Q2)
A.
Part b) refer to earlier post Past Year 2011 Q6.
a) Market Intelligence - defined by Wikipedia.
Market intelligence is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining strategy in areas such as market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development.
Business Intelligence refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making and as such can be defined as a decision support system.
Market intelligence includes gathering of data from the company’s external environment, whereas the Business intelligence process primarily is based on internal recorded events – such as sales, shipments and purchases. The purpose of incorporating Market Information or intelligence into the Business Intelligence process is to provide decision makers with a more “complete picture” of ongoing corporate performance in a set of given market conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_intelligence
Primarily external data collected and analyzed by a business about markets that it anticipates participating in with the intention of using it in making decisions. Marketing intelligence can be used to assess market entry opportunities and to formulate market development plans and penetration strategies.
Ref:
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/marketing-intelligence.html
From the able two definition, market intelligence or marketing intelligence are largely the same apart from the emphasis that:
- Market Intelligence is about EXTERNAL market, whereas
- Marketing Intelligence is about a PROCESS of gathering information for the marketing functions of the organisation
Hence, you may consider Market intelligence as a subset of Marketing intelligence.
The GOALS of Marketing Intelligence are:
"To equip all business units effectively with intimate and current knowledge about markets and competitor activities, capacities in these market places in a timely and user-friendly, efficient fashion."
In order to achieve this, the company needs to establish a sustainable, globally managed and regionally/locally supported and efficiently utilized Market Intelligence & Competitive Intelligence program with standardized processes and tools.
Improve competitiveness - Right info at the right time in the right format
Market intelligence, namely intelligence on competitors can make all the difference of winning or losing in the market place. Speed and simplicity will help marketers and sales staff to move in hard on the competition by not only predicting but acting consciously and aggressively on the competitor’s moves.
Increase efficiency - Avoid long searching, offer quick finding
Marketing staff and sales managers tend to lose their patience (and rightfully so) when being forced to spend too much time away from their customers. No blame as they just try to avoid what they are not paid for: wasting time. Help them to achieve their goals and set the right priorities in the market place in their sales activities by implementing simple and efficient intelligence tools.
Safe cost - Stop multiple report and consultancy service acquisitions
When your organization exceeds a certain size and thus is less easily managed, serviced and controlled chances are some of the units who tend to not to communicate with each other pick up the same report for thousands of dollars in several departments. Doesn’t happen too often? How about once and you could save $12’000 just while exercising a little control and leadership.
Speed-up Idea to Market - Quicker identification of upcoming trends and opportunities
Beyond wasting money many industry reports or market studies (worse even: customized and individual studies done especially for you) tend to be utilized in incredible limited ways due to “silo thinking” and strict hierarchical executing. Expanding market reach and gaining speed to access the market with fresh ideas could be achieved when access to such studies and reports is not limited any longer and cross-functional collaboration and action planning is encouraged.
Further, detailed business goals and their definitive wording could look like…
- Eliminate multiple and double spending on industry and market reports by centrally and globally orchestrated intelligence acquisition (monetary impact to be evaluated after status quo completion)
- Dramatically improve (response speed) intelligence availability through cross-industry news and article feed, message alerting and other communication mean
- Multiply utilization of relevant intelligence through globally accessible intelligence depositories based on true business intelligence requirements and following corporate and business strategies for simple e-push solutions
- Develop sophisticated intelligence processes and solutions interconnecting legacy system driven data and information streams
- Establish world-class international intelligence expertise network of Marketing & Sales professionals acting as intelligence champions for business units in all active selling organizations and global, regional market units
Sell-able Goals as Business Benefits
- Cost savings through efficient use of intelligence (avoiding search)
- Cost savings through increased risk/damage control
- Cost savings through globally managed reports acquisition, avoiding duplication
- Cost savings through avoidance of multiple intelligence tasks
- Productivity increase through reduction of material to be consumed and increased user-friendliness / standardization
- Sales increase through improved customer call preparations
- Revenue increase through sales loss avoidance
- Increased profitability through early adoption to new market opportunities (early market access, created markets justify higher margins)
Ref:
Jens Thieme. Business Goals for Market Intelligence, Business Intelligence Processes and Tools
Defining top level goals for the market intelligence effort and systems is of material importance in terms of internal selling and to be able to work towards maximum delivery. In the end: the result as value in use will determine acceptance and usefulness for marketers and sales staff.
http://www.markintell.com/goals/