Six Steps for Success October 1, 2006
Posted by admin in : Market Research , trackbackIn an article on destinationCRM.com Allen Long describes how the combination of competitive intelligence and market research - what he calls “Optimized Market Intelligence” - maximizes customer acquisition and retention.
This combined effort produces optimized market intelligence that leads to best-informed executive decision-making regarding company growth. Unfortunately, many companies fail to combine their efforts in this way and are missing out on valuable opportunities to grow their businesses, improve ROI, and best connect with customers.
Furtheron, he describes six vital factors for the success of the combined forces.
- How can your company’s CI and market research groups cooperate to reap the benefits of a super survey? Here are several key steps.
- CI and market research should choose the high-growth product or service and the known or hypothesized customer segments to study based on their own knowledge and input from top marketing and other company-growth decision-makers.
- Jointly examine relevant evidence and decide which two competitors are your company’s greatest arch rivals regarding this product or service and its target customers.
- Design the marketing P-related questions in a workshop of CI, market research, and product development/product marketing experts. Once the marketing P questions have been set, market research should design and launch the survey. Market research should add any customer need- or segmentation-focused questions as necessary.
- When the results come in, market research should analyze the survey results to identify where your company has competitive marketing advantages or disadvantages is areas that are highly important to customers. Typically, this information is passed to strategic marketing, product management, or another group that recommends how your company should adjust its marketing strategy to maximize customer acquisition, purchases, and retention.
- The CI group should combine the survey information with other competitive information gathered outside of the survey and use these data as inputs to CI analytic models. The CI group then can transform this output into an internal intelligence product that will inform executive decision-makers about emerging opportunities and threats in this product category, the implications for your company, and strategic recommendations regarding actions your company should take.
Allen Long is managing director at Outward Insights, a Boston competitive intelligence and strategy consulting firm.
Read the full article Competitive Intelligence + Market Research = Optimized Market Intelligence
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