We’ve all been there. You have a hypothesis to verify, a key decision to inform, but you just can’t find the data to support it. You’re sure it’s out there – your preliminary research bears this out – but you can’t quite nail down the crucial data points. 

It’s not like there isn’t enough information out there. Every person, organization, machine, and process is generating data constantly, whether actively or passively – data that can be used to understand the world around us and is indispensable in making informed decisions about how to operate within it. Statista places the amount of data generated in 2023 at a mind-boggling 120 zettabytes (1 trillion gigabytes), with that figure set to climb to 147 this year. 

Finding, corralling, sorting, prioritizing, and verifying the metaphorical forest among all those metaphorical trees is a labor-intensive task, a necessary step for value creation but not necessarily one within the scope of most team members – people whose expertise should ideally be put towards making and implementing decisions. That’s where market intelligence (MI) comes in. 

Taking an intelligent approach

Market Intelligence refers to the systematic process that businesses employ to access, collect, analyze, and oversee comprehensive data related to the market. The goal of market intelligence is to derive valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making. It differentiates itself from other forms of business intelligence, which typically analyze internal business operations such as sales data, financial data, and operational efficiency, by focusing on understanding the external business environment – for example customers, competitors, products, and trends. MI can also be seen as distinct from traditional market research, which typically involves gathering data specific to a particular market segment or customer group through methods such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Rather, it encompasses a broader scope including ongoing analysis of market trends, competitive dynamics, and product life cycle information, providing a more holistic view of the market environment. market intelligence is broadly categorized into four segments: competitor, product, market, and customer. 

‍Competitor intelligence involves understanding your competitors’ strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market position, so you can better anticipate their moves and come up with sound counter-strategies. 

‍Product intelligence serves the purpose of innovating and adapting products to meet evolving market needs by tracking product life cycles, features, pricing, and performance.

‍Market understanding is the process of analyzing market size, growth rate, market and technology trends, and market segments, helping to identify threats and opportunities as soon as possible and stay ahead of the curve.

‍Customer understanding revolves around your customers’ needs, preferences, behavior, and satisfaction, which will guide product adaptation and ideally help grow customer loyalty.

This sort of intelligence is vital for any organization that wishes to determine market segmentation, penetration, opportunities, and existing metrics accurately, and offers a number of benefits. Market intelligence underpins strategic decision making, guiding everything from product development to pricing and marketing campaigns. It informs risk mitigation, identifying threats such as new competitors and changing customer preferences or regulations, and guiding mitigation strategies accordingly. By identifying new markets, market segments or customer needs, market intelligence can help organizations find new opportunities for business growth. All of this helps a business understand its competitors, customers and market trends better, conferring a considerable competitive advantage. ‍

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How it works

There are a number of ways in which market intelligence experts gather the sort of information that can provide these advantages. ‍

Studying market trends and competitors

‍In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” This is as true in business as it is on the field of battle. Knowledge of what your rivals offer is essential to remaining competitive. Analyzing their products, products, services, pricing, and market opportunities yields insights that can shape your business strategy and stand out.

‍Staying abreast of industry developments‍

It goes without saying that proactively and regularly learning about developments in your industry will help understand your company’s place in it better. There’s a wealth of free and paid resources available online, from industry reports to trade publications, that can help you stay up to date with news and trends.

Establish a customer feedback loop‍

It’s essential to have up-to-the-minute information about customer sentiment. Use methods like surveys, questionnaires, polls, and interviews to gain valuable insights. ‍

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Who is Market Intelligence for? 

In an increasingly transparent, globalized and hyper-competitive marketplace, almost any organization can benefit from market intelligence. Moreover, this isn’t limited to any particular function or team. 

‍Corporate innovation teams

‍Market intelligence can help drive corporate innovation strategy by helping these teams spot fresh market opportunities and grasp market dynamics before launching new products or services.

‍Corporate strategy teams

‍Their role involves understanding market shifts, anticipating disruptions, and crafting medium- to long-term organizational strategies, all of which require deep insights into the market.

‍Consulting teams

‍Market intelligence can facilitate more thorough comprehension of the market and industry landscape, enabling consulting teams to provide genuinely insightful and valuable advice to clients.

‍Corporate venture capital teams

‍Corporate VC teams scout for new investment prospects, manage portfolios, and stay informed about market changes to fuel parent company growth, responsibilities that clearly require up-to-the-minute intelligence.

‍Scouting teams

‍With a focus on understanding emerging players in industry ecosystems – whether for investment, partnerships, or monitoring – to mitigate disruption risks, scouting teams require both breadth and depth of information.

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How can it help?

The right market intelligence solutions, correctly implemented, can help address a range of challenges and pain points for corporations. 

‍Seeing the big picture

We’ve established that there’s a plethora of information available to organizations – but the challenge is finding tools that have the right coverage of that particular organization’s focus areas. Many of these offer vast databases that need to be scoured for potentially useful insights, diverting valuable time and effort that could be better put to use acting on those insights. The right market intelligence services will provide a scope of coverage tailored to a company’s particular needs. It’s also crucial that this coverage is collated and presented in a digestible, easily comprehensible format appropriate to the topic and audience. When mathematician Clive Humby (allegedly) said “Data is the new oil”, it’s unclear if he knew what an apt metaphor he’d coined. Like oil, data has become an indispensable and highly valuable commodity in our contemporary economy. However, like oil, data needs to be refined and, in many cases, transformed before it can become truly useful. Charts, graphs, maps, and dashboards can help to identify trends, patterns, relationships, and outliers within your data, while also making it easier to effectively convey your discoveries and insights to your intended audience. ‍

Trustworthiness and consistency

A proactive, data-driven strategy requires trustworthy, verified information in real time and at scale. It seems like an impossible trifecta to achieve, but it’s precisely what teams need, as incorrect information can result in poorly informed strategies, lost opportunities, and consequently loss of income. Once you’ve identified your data scope, that data needs to be evaluated for accuracy, consistency, and completeness, cross-referencing information, validating it against reliable sources, and dealing with discrepancies. Market intelligence solutions operate according to rigorous data governance principles, auditing and evaluating the credibility of sources regularly, and keeping a clear view of where the data flows from. Data flows from a multitude of sources, each with its own limitations, biases, and potential issues. Recognizing these is the first challenge. The next challenge is ensuring completeness and consistency, which is done by implementing data profiling techniques and rules for errors and quality issues. Then the data needs to be transformed and integrated to standardize structures, time zones, units, and so forth. Market intelligence research also takes into account the temporal context of data, including seasonality, evolving trends, and market dynamics, all of which can have a bearing on the validity of information over time. 

Speed and scale

Meeting these challenges at the speed and scale required by the modern business environment is a challenge beyond the means of even the most well-equipped of organizations, let alone small to medium enterprises. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a vital tool in processing vast volumes of data from disparate sources, quickly. However, these tools are not without their own challenges, not least of which is cost. While enterprise AI solutions are cropping up and evolving constantly, they still represent a considerable capital outlay for many organizations. It’s also important to realize AI is not a silver bullet that can be fired at any business challenge; it requires consideration of the specific business case, careful implementation, and rigorous training on accurate data. Moreover, while some people think AI will supplant human data analysts, the relationship is more one of enhancement. AI is lightning-fast at crunching data and spotting patterns, but it sometimes overlooks the nuances of information. Data analysts, on the other hand, can draw on experience and intuition to grasp the context and the hidden stories within the data, asking precisely the right questions to weave together insights that align with company goals and ethical boundaries. 

Case study

A Fortune 500 company wanted to take their market research and intelligence capabilities to the next level. By adopting market intelligence tools, the team streamlined their process considerably, transitioning from three full-time staff members spending 80% of their time on a quarterly global market share report to one staff member and two interns producing 42 highly targeted market share reports each year. This efficiency boost allowed the team to dedicate more attention to creating customized executive reports, resulting in improved productivity and strategic influence.  

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Conclusion

The age of the data-driven organization is here, and any corporation wishing to remain competitive in today’s business environment needs the maximum amount of data at their fingertips – about competitors, products, markets, and customers – in order to guide their strategy and decision-making across the board. This is easier said than done, however, with sheer volumes of data gathered from a burgeoning variety of sources presenting both an opportunity and a considerable challenge for enterprises of all sizes. Teams need data that is both sufficiently broad but also focused, reliable, complete, and consistent – at a scale and speed that only AI can provide. Crucially, however, they need that data to be vetted and interpreted by experienced, sensitive analysts, and presented in a digestible way that takes the legwork out of data-crunching and frees up resources for genuine value-creating tasks. Market intelligence tools are designed with these requirements in mind, helping corporations navigate and take advantage of data and enabling them to make better decisions, mitigate risks, identify opportunities, and ultimately gain a much-needed competitive advantage. 

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Get an edge with Speeda Edge

Speeda Edge takes a unique approach to market intelligence, aggregating a vast quantity of industry, technology, and company information and mapping corporate strategies to partnerships, acquisitions, and investments in emerging industries. What sets us apart is our commitment to data verification and our recognition of the importance of the human element, with a team of analysts available to assist enterprises in gathering and extracting insights from data.

‍Contact us to learn how teams like yours can use market intelligence tools to facilitate better decision-making, just as Swiss Re does with Speeda Edge.

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