Market Intelligence: The 4 Components To Unlocking Competitive Advantage

Market intelligence is about understanding the external environment of your organization, and how you can use data gathered on that environment for optimal positioning within your industry.

By looking at market intelligence data from competitors, products, and customers, you can form a strategy to stay competitive and grow your brand.

Market intelligence requires plenty of research and an overarching strategy to collect valuable insights. Only when you have the correct data sources will you be able to:

a) Understand your position in your industry, and;

b) Create a marketing strategy to reposition your brand where you want it to be.

In essence, the role of marketing intelligence is to support and inform your strategic business decisions and ensure you remain agile and competitive.

This guide will take you through the four core components to market intelligence, and how strategic decision making can catapult your brand to the next level.

What is market intelligence?

Before we look at the four components in more detail, we need to understand what market intelligence is.

Market intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about market trends, including those related to customers and competitors. If you're a marketing manager or work for a marketing agency, it's likely that you'll be required to gather data on a brand, its audience, products, and competitors, in order to create a market map.

This map will highlight what opportunities and threats are coming to the market, what competitors are doing, what customers want, and where your brand is positioned.

From here, you can begin to strategize on how you reposition your brand within that market.

Four components of market intelligence

Market intelligence covers a broad scope of data sources but you can boil the practice down into four specific segments. Three focus on the specific areas of a market that you need to be constantly aware of, while the fourth looks at the overarching health of a market, and where your brand sits within it.

The four are:

1. Competitive intelligence: Understanding the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of your competitors
2. Product intelligence: Assessing the features, pricing, and performance of your product
3. Customer intelligence: Discovering the needs and preferences of your target audience
4. Market understanding: Monitoring the trends, market size, and growth potential of your target market

This guide will go through each of the four marketing intelligence segments and explain how they all tie together. After that, we'll look at the process required to squeeze the most value out of each segment.

1. Competitive intelligence

Let's begin with competitive intelligence, as this is likely to be the one you're most familiar with if you work in market research. Your competitors will be offering similar products or services to your own brand, but might be doing things slightly differently.

So, it's important to run effective market research to get a wider understanding and see what they're doing right and wrong.

Gathering competitor insights

Understanding your competitors means you can gain a better view of the market and make informed decisions.

It starts by identifying your main competitors and gathering information about their products, services, and overall market position.

Data sources for competitor intelligence include:

• Publicly available information: Websites, press releases, patent filings, and financial reports. Effectively, anything that is out in the open.
• Social media: Listen in to your competitors social media accounts (by using software from a company like Brandwatch) to identify their marketing strategies and customer interactions.
• Customer feedback and sentiment: Analyze customer reviews and testimonials, and read their social media posts, to understand your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

Analyzing your competitors

Once you've gathered your competitor insights, the next step is to analyze the competitive landscape broadly. By evaluating the current state of the market, you can identify opportunities and threats, which will help you make informed decisions.

There are several tools and methods you can use to analyze the competitive landscape:

• SWOT analysis: Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of each competitor to help you understand why they are different to you. Do they spend more on marketing? Is their product rated better than yours? Are they saving costs somewhere where you're not?
• Market share analysis: Look at industry sales or revenue to determine your competitors' market share compared to your own. You'll need to look at financial reports to gauge this but it's hugely valuable in understanding why a rival might be performing better than you.
• Benchmarking: Compare your company's performance metrics to your own. One of the most accessible forms of market intelligence is in comparing perceptions of the different brands in a market online via sentiment or emotion analysis. You can also look at factors such as pricing, advertising, product features, and so on against those of your competitors to identify gaps and areas for improvement. For example, a rival might have a bigger market share of an identical service because they sell it for less.
• Trends: Keep an eye on market trends and emerging technologies to see how your competitors are adapting, and how you can evolve with the market too.

The result of collecting market intelligence around your rivals is to understand where you sit compared to them. However, this is only one of four strands of marketing intelligence, so let's now look at your customers.

2. Customer intelligence

Customer preferences are what guide the products and marketing campaigns of most companies. The old adage that "the customer is always right" works for the majority of brands, and so it's important to align your company with the needs of its audience. This kind of market intelligence can help you identify opportunities – what are customers asking for that none of your competitors are doing?

To get to this point, you need to run analysis on customers to understand your relationship with them and how their needs are changing.

Assessing customer needs

The first step is to obtain deep insights into customer needs. Doing this means you can reposition your messaging, products, or services to align with what they want.

There are two ways to do this. The first is to proactively ask your customers and get direct feedback on their views. You can do this via surveys, a phone call campaign, competitions, and even face-to-face interviews.

Companies do this sort of research all the time. After all, who hasn't had a phone call from a brand asking if you have five minutes' spare to give your thoughts on something you bought?

The second approach is to monitor your customers from afar. You can do this my analyzing sales trends in line with previous marketing campaigns, and listening in to social conversations.

Social media monitoring is hugely valuable for gauging what customers really think about your product. They may be polite when talking to your researchers on the phone, but will be more truthful when discussing your brand with friends on social media.

A social listening tool like Brandwatch's gives brands this level of insight into what customers really think.

These two steps – proactive research and monitoring from afar – will reveal what your customers need. From there, it's about fulfilling those needs.

3. Product intelligence

Understanding what your rivals are doing, and how your customers relate to your brand, is important. However, those two pillars of market intelligence are nothing without a full understanding of what benefits your product or service brings to the market.

Product intelligence is about creating something that meets the demand of an audience or customer base. Your brand might be really attractive but if your product is terrible then your sales will eventually plummet.

Equally, you might have a killer product that works better than your competitors, but you struggle to sell it because your branding and marketing efforts aren't good enough.

Aligning product with market needs

It doesn't matter if you already have products on the market or if you're planning to launch one, it's vital you understand what your customers want.

To do this, start by analyzing your customers' preferences, identifying any gaps in your existing product lineup. This information is crucial in guiding your product strategy. You can also take a look at specific feedback they have about your products to see what improvements can be made.

Then gather insights and keep track of your competitors' offerings. By staying up-to-date with the latest market trends, you can take advantage of new opportunities as they arise.

You can then make data-driven decisions by looking at customer feedback, sales data, and trends. From here, it's possible to realign your product with what your audience wants.

Innovating to meet emerging demand

A central aspect of product intelligence is innovation. A global corporation can spend millions of dollars on a new product but, if it fails to innovate, then the product may be totally ignored by a customer base that has moved on.

Products need to have the capacity to meet the evolving needs of customers. Smartphones, for example, require regular software updates to stay on top of technological innovations.

A restaurant, meanwhile, might need to identify emerging trends in the food industry, to develop its menu and meet fresh demand.

Conducting regular product intelligence research is therefore crucial. Even if sales are up, it's important to run focus groups, analyze the broader market, and collect data about your product to ensure it's correctly positioned for the future. This kind of data should be routinely shared across teams to ensure that everyone is aware of strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.

4. Market understanding

Finally we come to market understanding and the process of creating a competitive edge. Your competitive, customer, and product intelligence can help here, as it all forms the backdrop of your overall business strategy.

All you need now is to bring this data together, visualize your market, and spot opportunities for the future.

Visualize the industry

Time to pull all the data you've gathered from your competitive, customer, and product analyses together. Here, you can begin to visualize your strengths and weaknesses, and where they sit within the wider market.

For example, a sneakers producer in Texas might notice that its brand loyalty and customer satisfaction rates are very high, but its market share is small. Customers view these sneakers as high-quality, so perhaps the next step is to raise prices and become a trusted top-label brand, instead of trying to compete in the wider, cheaper market.

Achieving a sustainable advantage

Once you've visualized the industry you'll be able to see where you can begin to acquire a sustainable advantage over the competition.

This is about continuously gathering market intelligence to identify trends, opportunities, and potential threats. That Texas sneaker brand we mentioned might, for example, realize a rival has made a series of business decisions that reduces costs, making their sneakers much cheaper.

But all the market intelligence the brand has gathered suggests customers will stay loyal even if their sneakers are more expensive.

So, in order to achieve a sustainable advantage, the brand may choose to launch a fresh commercial campaign that highlights the quality of their shoes.

Success through market share

Commanding market share is usually the holy grail in business, but your market intelligence data will help guide your decision making on this.

After all, you might not need to dominate a market. There's no point spending millions of dollars developing a new product and putting your brand at risk, only to find your audience is by nature more niche.

Instead, market intelligence is about finding the gaps within your industry that you can easily fill, and thus grow your market share and success the smart way.

You can do this by doing three things:

• Develop unique selling points (USPs). These are features that distinguish your offering from those of competitors. Examples include superior quality, lower prices, or better customer service.
• Offer superior customer experience. Focus on providing excellent service, meeting customer needs, and building long-term relationships.
• Establish strategic partnerships and alliances. Collaborate with other companies to leverage your strengths and gain access to new customers and markets.

The market intelligence process

The above four components of market intelligence combine to give you actionable insights for whatever decision you need to make.

You might plan to stay ahead of the competition and launch a new product, chase a new target market, increase customer loyalty, or perhaps even change internal factors within your business to be more efficient.

No matter the results of your market intelligence, the process to gathering data is the same.

Below is a quick guide to acquiring market intelligence data.

Gathering data for market intelligence

Market intelligence gathering begins with assessing your industry and understanding the full breadth of its impact. You'll need to look at:

• What products or services are sold
• Who your customers or audiences are
• Why the industry exists in the first place
• Where the industry is located from a geographical and demographic perspective
• Who talks about the industry (media sources, publications, influencers, consumers, etc)

From here you can begin to collect data on each point. For example, you can run online sentiment analysis to see what customers think about your brand. You can also look at sales figures to see where business is strongest in the world.

Don't hesitate to leverage both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods.

Analysis and interpretation

Once you've collected the data, the next step is to analyze and interpret your findings. This can be achieved by using an analytical tool or software to categorize and visualize your data effectively.

If you get the right tool, you'll be able to feed your data into the four categories we've spoken about earlier in the article:

• Competitive intelligence
• Product intelligence
• Customer intelligence
• Market understanding

Once you've categorized everything, you can consolidate your findings into a market intelligence report by presenting the data in a clear, concise manner using visual aids such as charts and graphs. Remember, you'll need to share this with other stakeholders, so it's important your report is easy to understand.

Keep in mind that this report should be regularly updated so you stay ahead of the game.