Abstract:

As organizations evolve from multi-domestic to transnational they need to develop new ways of obtaining sharing and acting upon marketing information. The technological advances that led to the ‘marketing information revolution’ now provide firms the opportunity to develop new approaches to creating strategic and competitive marketing intelligence. This paper describes how Henkel has generated a vision for knowledge management designed to create new sources of competitive intellectual capital. Apart from benchmarking the current processes of knowledge management the creation of a transnational data warehouse as the foundation is key. The process of creating competitive knowledge by generating integrated (i.e. across sources) and international (i.e. across countries) insights is described. The paper describes steps from standard reporting of one information source to data mining across many information sources and the consequences these changes represent both for marketing and market research functions inside a company