International market research is key to successful export planning. Helps you anticipate risks, identify opportunities, discover strategic insights, and make informed strategic decisions.
What is market intelligence?
Market intelligence is the term used to describe the process of learning about your competition and how your industry is operating. It is an essential part of running any business, regardless of size or industry, and it is company-focused. Over the years, the definition has grown to include analytics that can help improve your overall business model and forecast accuracy.
Not to be confused with marketing research, which is designed to learn more about customer preferences. Instead, market intelligence should be seen as a branch of market research. Also known as market assessment research, designed to help companies get their foot in the door of a market or increase their market presence.
Market intelligence involves the use of various sources of information to build a panoramic view of a company’s current market, customers, competition, problems, growth potential, and the potential for additional products and services. Possible raw data sources include sales records, social media, surveys, studies, and more.
Importance of market intelligence
Many companies use market intelligence to provide context for their business intelligence. Business intelligence differs from market intelligence in that it refers to broader information about customers and products, such as the total number of products shipped, total sales in a month, and other transactions that occur within a company.
Market intelligence focuses instead on specific customer closings, providing geographic and demographic information about what they buy. All of this helps inform business intelligence analysis. Market intelligence also influences what is happening with the competition, something that business intelligence does not recognize at all.
Market intelligence has six main purposes:
• Help enter a new market or expand your presence in a current market.
• Minimize risk in investment decisions.
• Stay ahead of the competition and gain an advantage over them.
• Expand market share in an existing market to give customers what they want.
• Tailor products and marketing efforts to customer needs.
• Establish and maintain a distinct corporate identity.
Types of market intelligence
Depending on the sources of the data being collected and analyzed and the nature of your industry and market, there are many types of market intelligence. Here we will see the main ones.
• Competitor intelligence
Today, competitor intelligence is a critical tool for effective marketing and business success. Competitor intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information about the competition.
However, competitive intelligence is not the act of spying on the competition. It is based on the ethical collection of different types of information, including government records.
Typically, competitor intelligence activities help you build a picture of the competitive environment in which your business operates, as well as create comprehensive competitor profiles.
• Customer intelligence
Today, only a deep understanding of the customer can boost your sales and revenue. Customer intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information about your customers. The goal is to understand the customer’s motivations, beliefs, intentions, preferences, and perceptions.
The goal is to get valuable and intelligent information about customers. It is understanding why consumers buy (or don’t buy) particular products that allows you to meet people’s demands and expectations.
Customer intelligence helps you create a profile of your customers that includes geographic, demographic, psychographic, and socioeconomic characteristics. In addition, it consists of creditworthiness and purchasing patterns.
• Geopolitical intelligence
The business environment is complex and globally interconnected. Geopolitical intelligence is a process of collecting and analyzing foreign trade information on regional and global geopolitical aspects, such as languages, culture, history, laws, trade policies, and typical business practices of a country (or countries).
This type of intelligence is most common for multinational and global companies that operate in multiple countries and need data and information about different markets and locations.
To conduct this type of market intelligence, large global companies may create an in-house team that performs geopolitical intelligence functions. Smaller companies often use external services.
• Product intelligence
Product intelligence is a process of collecting and analyzing information about your company’s products and those of your competitors. The goal is to provide data-driven insights to your management team for product development decisions and innovation activities.
Although it covers areas of customer and competitor intelligence, product intelligence is considered a separate type of marketing intelligence because of its primary focus: the product.
Product intelligence is about a deep understanding of product features such as pricing, ratings, promotions, attributes, distributions, availability, etc. It helps you sell more to existing customers, provide better customer service, support your other departments, prove concepts, track success, and more.
How is market intelligence applied?
How market intelligence is conducted determines success in answering specific questions about current and potential competitors and customers, while helping an organization determine its internal goals. Questions that this data can answer include:
• Where should you focus more resources?
• Which employers, if any, do the best customers buy?
• What demographic segments can we target both new and existing products?
• What markets should we enter next?
• Is there a product that we can market to our existing customers?
Rwazi, transforming market intelligence like no other
Using actionable data from emerging markets on who is purchasing what, for how much, from where, when, and why, Rwazi, a platform for market intelligence, enables multinational corporations to increase sales and expand.
The company uses a network of 50,000 and more local consumers called “mappers” spread across 50+ countries in Africa, Asia, and South America to collect data from their localities using mobile/web apps, enabling them to tap into thousands of retail establishments, homes, and individual consumers each day.
Joseph Rutakangwa’s entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to launch a number of businesses, including a digital magazine and businesses in wealth management, agriculture, and video production. Future News Worldwide, a program of the British Council Scotland, honored him for his work. The Glasgow Caledonian University awarded him a BA in Business Management.
In addition to his work at Rwazi, Rutakangwa provides advice to a number of early-stage startups, including Eco-Blocks, a company supported by the UNDP that creates artificial coral reefs, and Ecopads, a company based in the US that sells environmentally friendly sanitary products. He thinks that the best strategy for lowering unemployment in developing nations is to create gig work.
Several honors, including the Brave Founder of the Year award from the Southern Africa Startup Awards and a nomination for the Global Startup Awards’ People’s Choice, have been bestowed upon Rutakangwa for his creative business methods and commitment to fostering the success of others. He is a true visionary in his industry, and the landscape of international business has been significantly impacted by his work.
