As previously discussed, Market Intelligence (MI) is intelligence about the trade and industry a company is operating in and is unlike Business Intelligence which focuses on the company’s own processes.
MI’s aim is to help the company grow. It is important to note that many companies use MI to provide context to its Business Intelligence and therefore MI is a critical information support for any company that is operating in a competitive industry. MI is a cyclical process and can repeat based on the goals, targets and needs of the Company.
The ‘MI operation’ to be effective can be aided by data sources, field resources, analytics, systems and processes to pull data together, technology and platforms to deliver, store, process, and distribute the info and most importantly the support of the top management.
Despite the world of market intelligence is increasingly immersed in data and cloud, this mere ‘immersion’ does not serve the intel needs on its own.
Tim Sutton explains this in PROvoke Media: “The idea that data automatically leads to wisdom is pervasive…as long ago as 2010, David Weinberger pointed out its failings in the Harvard Business Review: “Knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound.” (Opinion: For Data, The End of the Age of Innocence-By Tim Sutton-Published in www.provokemedia.com – Nov 24, 2020)
In that, rather than Searching for data (which is a routine act), the focus should on ‘Researching’-approaching data and info collection systematically to prove/disprove assumptions and gain new understandings to inform thinking, decision making, and / or actions in relation to organizational stakeholders.
This is where large volumes of data transform themselves to become useful knowledge and market intel. When talking of business research, the immediate idea that pops into one’s mind is Market Research (MR). This is no surprise since MR has a staple in the global business world. According to ResearchAndMarkets.com the global market research services market in 2020 was at US $74 billion. How large is that? Almost close to the global vision care market or medical imaging device market size. The MR industry is expected to rise to US $82.9 billion sector by 2023!
Both MI and MR largely work in a similar way and often complement each other. “Today, market researchers are much more focused on improving the quality of business decision-making. MI composes of internal, sectorial (external, but correlated by internal organizational configurations) and external sources to produce specific, focused knowledge to marketing processes and decision making guided to implement aggregated value positioning” (DVL Smith and JH Fletcher’s overview of the MR industry- 2008).
Business Research is not academic research but aims at finding a solution to the business issue (academic research only aims at expanding the scope of previously created academic theories). Business Research on the other hand aims at a diagnosis or a solution. After diagnosing the issue, a questionnaire is created to gather data, from which conclusions are arrived at, from which recommendations come forth and from which action plans are drawn and implemented. During this entire series of steps, the researchers need to be clear of what they are looking for and what type of research work is entailed to unearth the sought intel.
The starting steps to good intel therefore starts with Research, rather than with ‘Search’ / ‘Data’ / ‘the Cloud’…etc.
