Abstract:

The purpose of market intelligence is to provide management with the facts, information and insights it needs to make rapidly the best, most efficient business decisions. Well organised, market intelligence can be a substantial source of competitive advantage. Market intelligence is primarily concerned with the future, forecasting and predicting, not with describing the past. Market intelligence starts with asking pertinent questions, which calls for: 1. an extensive working knowledge of the market in all aspects o some imagination, to have a creative stance to the future Market intelligence is dependent on the company strategy, but also shapes the strategy. In this way it is, in the end, a responsibility of top management more than of a specialist function. The rise and demise of many strategic planning departments in the 1970s and 1980s, when left with an impossible task and divorced from management, is the salutary example to avoid repeating. Like strategic planning, market intelligence requires the involvement of the whole management team, and indeed the support of everyone in the company.