Market Intelligence (MI) is a process of identifying the Competitive Advantage of the Company with the support of Product Intelligence (PI), Customer Understanding (CU), Marketing Understanding (MU), Competitor Intelligence (CI) and Competitor Intelligence (CI).
One of the key areas MI tries to uncover is the Competitive Advantage that the company has within its industry sector. Who are the Company’s competitors and how better is the company’s product compared to competitors’? Why (reasons) should customers go for the Company’s product rather than that of competitors? Competitive advantage analysts try to find answers on the cost advantage the company has, what is the differentiation its products have and the product focus.
Product Intelligence (PI) is a key part of MI. PI focuses on the product-why consumers want the company’s product and what attributes ‘sell’. PI aims to understand an important relationship-how customers interact with its products and what the company needs to do to its products to retain the customers continuously. In short, what is the experience that the customers are reporting about the product? When Picturephone, a phone which had video calling, was fist launched in 1970 by AT&T. It was breakthrough technology for that time but the phone was so bulky with multiple boxes to assemble and so difficult to operate, it failed in a big way. Had AT&T conducted a PI before market launch, the company could have produced a revised design. PI focuses on unstructured data to identify customer preferences. Is there a new need that the product can meet? If the product cannot meet any new customer needs, what needs to be changed in the product to meet a new need?
As much as PI works on the product, Customer Understanding (CU) tries to find what can be offered to customers; customer knowledge and possibilities and what they want are important decision for product developers where CU assists in. CU is aided by analytics, knowledge management, source management and consumer intelligence. CU is frequently used by companies in FMCG, retail food and processed food sectors. CU is also increasingly used by tech companies as well. When SaaS launched its low cost team collaboration tool “Chanty’ it used CI to position it accurately. Lately smartphone manufacturers too are adapting CU methods to re-design arrays of phone designs within a particular model ‘series’ to cater to varied customer needs.
Another pillar of MI is Marketing Understanding (MU); this helps to understand the pulse of the market, the market segments the product is mostly and least used, why it is used in this way and where the market for the product is headed to. For instance, if the market is detergents, are consumers abandoning routine detergent products in place of aromatic detergents? If so, why is consumer switching to such detergents and in what demographics most and least? Apart from intelligence analytics, what forms of market research can be used here? Also, what is the overall market outlook? What market knowledge is useful-is it a mature market or immature? How is the regulatory environment impacting on the market? MU is one of the most important pillars in MI since most products fail in the market and reason for failure is they entered the market without MU. Microsoft Windows Vista and ‘Coca-Cola C2’ failed –despite their heavy marketing budgets- due to the lack of MU on the company’s part prior to launch.
Another important pillar in MI is Competitor Intelligence (CI). This is essentially collection, describing, analyzing and sharing of intelligence about competitors, their products, pricing and offers made by the them. This largely works at Business to Business levels. Industry networking events, social media analytics, blogs, search engines and publications of competitors are studied to find information. Specially with the massive loads of data available at present, CI has gained increased importance. It was CI that helped Japanese car makers to successfully break into the US car market in 1970s. The CI on the American market showed Japan that there was an increasing demand build-up for low cost, fuel efficient cars in US in 1970s and Japanese automakers won by speedily responding to this ‘report finding’ by supplying smaller cars to the US. Transport providers, Airlines and investment banks heavily rely on CI. It is by setting up a “Competitive Intelligence” internal group that Amazon successfully obtained competitor intel at granular levels and became the world’s largest online retailer.
The four inputs -Product Intelligence (PI), Customer Understanding (CU), Marketing Understanding (MU) and Competitor Intelligence (CI) – act as the wheels of MI that drives the company through the industry’s competition towards achieving organizational goals.
