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Marketing intelligence (MI) is the everyday information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metalworking’s Intelligence determines the Intelligence needed, collects It by searching environment and delivers It to marketing managers who need It.
Steps to be taken by a Company to Improve Its Marketing Intelligence (1) Train and Motivate Sales Force: A company’s sales force can be an excellent source of information about the current trends in the market. They are the “intelligence gatherers” for the company. The acquired facts can be regarding the company’s market offerings, whether any improvements are required or not or is there any opportunity for new products, etc. It can also provide credible source to know about competitor activities, consumers, distributors and retailers. 2) Motivate Distributors, retailers, and other intermediaries to pass along important intelligence: Specialists are hired by companies to gather marketing Intelligence. In order to measure the quality of production, the way the employees are behaving with customers, quality of faculties being provided; retailers and service providers send mystery shoppers. Firms can also assess the quality of customer experience with the shops with the use of mystery shoppers. (3) Network Externally: Every firm must keep a tab on its competitors.
Competitive intelligence describes the broader discipline of researching, analyzing and formulating data and information from the entire competitive environment of any organization. This can be done by purchasing the competitor’s products, checking the advertising campaigns, the press media coverage, reading their published reports, etc. Competitive intelligence must be legal and ethical. (4) Set up a customer advisory panel: Companies can set up panels consisting of customers.
They can be the company’s largest customers or representatives of customers or the most outspoken customers. Many business schools set up panels consisting of alumni who provide their knowledge and expertise and help In constituting the course curriculum. (5) Optimal usage of Government data resources: Governments of almost all countries publish reports regarding the population trends, demographic characteristics, agricultural production and a lot of other such data.
All this data must be or can be referred to as base data. It can help in planning and formulating policies for the companies. (6) Information bought from external suppliers: Certain agencies sell data that can be useful to other companies. For example, television channels will require information on the number of viewers, ratings of TV programs, etc. An agency which calculates his information and generates this data will provide it to companies that need it. 7) Collect Competitive Intelligence through online customer feedback: Customer’s view about a product is most essential for any company. Ultimately it’s the customer who’s buying the product. Hence customer feedback must be taken. Online platforms like chat rooms, blobs, discussion forums, customer review boards can be used to generate customer feedback.