What is Market Intelligence?

Market intelligence consists of information gathered from outside a company's four walls to guide better business decisions.

Market intelligence is a vital component of a company’s overall business intelligence strategy. It encompasses important information on customers, competitors, channels and other business-critical information such as regulatory filings and compliance. While much of this information is publicly available, much of it is on the Internet in unstructured form (such as that found in web pages or online documents), making it difficult to extract and translate into actionable intelligence.

Missing The Mark

Market intelligence today is missing the mark, which means that business decisions are made every day without a current and accurate view of the marketplace. There are many pressures contributing to this problem:

• Competitive Pressures – Businesses need to respond to market signals much faster than ever before, which places significant stress on traditional methods of market research and competitive intelligence.
• Business Pressures – Market research budgets are shrinking, and outsourcing competitive intelligence produces a lot of data, but little intelligence.
• IT Pressures – Internal IT efforts center around business intelligence, which is designed for managing operational information within the company. Combine this with an IT landscape littered with project failures, and the value of IT to the marketer becomes negligible.
• Technical Pressures – Market intelligence requires handling unstructured, uncontrolled data, which is not good for traditional methods like ETL, data warehousing, messaging or information integration. Search, today’s most common method for technically gathering information from outside a company’s walls, is often not smart enough to gather anything more than raw data.

Market Intelligence Closes The Gap

Today’s approaches cannot meet the marketer’s needs.

• Business Intelligence collects data within enterprises, from internal systems and processes, producing metrics for internal, operational decision making.
• Information services and custom market research provide packaged data sets that represent an external viewpoint.

What marketers need is a hybrid of both approaches – the power and customization of business intelligence with the external viewpoint of information services.

Market intelligence closes that gap.