Abstract
Market intelligence (MI) is a concept that results in real opportunities for knowledge management in organizations. MI is a cyclic process to deliver knowledge for strategic marketing decisions, considering typical organizations of a defined sector as its final users. As organizations must not react to external factors or phenomena, but must also try to lead their sector proposing and executing innovative plans and differential strategic positioning, MI is a modern and cooperative approach that can produce consistent bases for such planning abilities. It is an organizational continuum to answer typical decision problems faced by firms when competing in actual business environments. This chapter details the MI concept, working from theoretical point of view, and adds a practical approach on studying real cases of its potential applications. As MI is a multidisciplinary context, its conceptualization also provokes perspectives for research from other scientific fields, as information science, systems and management, computing science, human resources management, strategy, marketing.
TopBackground
Strategic planning and execution are two main contexts where market intelligence is definitely relevant for critical decisions, motivating the following evaluation as the start of this theoretical work.
Strategic Decision Scenarios and Its Demands for Continuous Knowledge
Strategy formulation and execution are knowledge-dependent tasks, demanding for its continuity reliable and updated knowledge availability (Jamil et al, 2012; Johnson, 2012; Dimitrios, Sakas & Vlachos, 2013).
Strategic marketing decisions are the objective of the MI process, as the knowledge provision aims to solve problems, allowing decisions with clearer risk delimitations and implementation results with better customer aggregated value perspectives, attending to the basic organizational marketing demands (Kotler & Keller, 2005; Schiffman & Kanuk, 2010; Ferrel & Hartline, 2010; De Man, 2012). Typical decisions of strategic marketing processes that can benefit from market intelligence process are:
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Product line configuration and distribution,
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Pricing,
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Advertising and general communication,
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Differentiation as a value-based strategy, and
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Marketing channel analysis.
As examples of knowledge needed in usual marketing decisions it can be perceived: consumer behavior details, demographic perspectives and constraints, customer reaction to distribution forms and communication, distribution channels performance and financial performance for all productive chain components. Knowledge provided for marketing strategic planning will allow any organization to develop its practical, tactical-to-operations plans, which will, at the end, specify the real work to be executed, aligned to those strategic views and propositions.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Strategic Marketing Planning: A part of the marketing planning process which intends to connect the strategic goals expressed in organizational strategic planning to tactical marketing specifications, which will lead to product or services definitions, prices, promotion and distribution.
Knowledge Management: A process that intends to administrate the creation, retention and registering, sharing, valuating, monitoring and application of knowledge in organizations.
Competitive Intelligence: An organizational process which aims helping to solve strategic problems and decisions through data and information collection, validation, analysis and results production.
Marketing: An integrated organizational discipline oriented to aggregate value for product and services, considering customers wishes and needs.
Market Intelligence: A continuous organizational process that intends to produce knowledge for strategic marketing planning, collecting data from a value-aggregate chain, validating, processing and communicating the final results in a standardized way.