CRISP - Marketing Intelligence Redefined

Things always seem so simple and straightforward in hindsight. Unfortunately we can't go back in time and made changes to our strategies or actions. Anyone who has worked on a marketing strategy would be very aware of this fact. Decisions need to be taken time bound with the available information. How best you can use the available data to drive your decision determines your outcome. The rest as they say, is in hindsight.

Business Strategy and Decisions need inputs from the real world. In many organisations, that means a call to the marketing department. Marketing departments are expected to answer questions of the business teams at short notice when they are faced with decision making that requires supporting data. And then begins the mayhem. Many a time, the data follows the decision than the decision following the insights from the data. It is a REAL problem that many of us face daily.

The reason for this is that market intelligence or marketing intelligence continues to be driven by reactive research than continuous market sensing. It's high time to redefine traditional marketing intelligence.

Market Intelligence has to be CRISP - Contextual, Real-time, Impacting, Supplemented and Predictive.

1. Contextual: Market sensing is all about identifying business events. Any activity in a market is an event involving one or more entities. These entities could be companies, products, technologies, industries or people. The interaction between them creates the market and sets the contexts of analysis. So, market intelligence firstly has to identify the contexts of business events and accordingly map or sense the market activity. The intelligence thus created has to be delivered to the organisation with full contextual classification. Else it leads to improper cognitive assessment of the intelligence input.
2. Real-time: Once you identify an event happening in the market, deliver it to your customer in real time. We live in times where digital media and information highways make information lose its sheen in quick time. If you are still doing quarterly market assessments, you can be sure that you are missing out on a lot of things. Intelligence today has to be real time.
3. Impacting: The job of market intelligence is not just to point out what is happening in the market. It is as much to also correlate and assess the impact of an event on the organisation. For example: how does an M&A event involving my customer impact me?, what is the impact of sustained low earnings reported in a particular industry segment to my business unit etc.
4. Supplemented: Intelligence is processed information. It always helps when the insight you deliver as the result of your market intelligence search is supplemented by the information that led you to the insight. By delivering intelligence along with the supplementary data, you raise the profile of the insight and also close off a number of objections.
5. Predictive: Ok, so what next? Its good to identify an opportunity or to identify a risk. But immediately your task switches to, what next? This is where predictive analytics comes in. Does your market intelligence point to a pattern previously observed or become an indicator for what could happen next? If you can successfully assess the possible future scenarios, then it helps take definitive actions. So if marketing needs to increase its relevance through the insight, it also needs to help leaders visualise possible future scenarios triggered by the intelligence input gathered.

So, is your marketing intelligence CRISP?

If not, its time to redefine your market intelligence gathering, analysis and delivery as you may be missing out on opportunities, failing to identify risks and making decisions that do not consider future scenarios. Adopt CRISP into your marketing intelligence philosophy and experience the differences.

About the Author:

Sidharth is the Business Head of InnoIntel Global. An experienced technology industry professional who specialises in Management and Leadership Consulting for Business Strategy, New Business Development, Go to market strategies etc.

Innointel is a marketing intelligence company focussed on platform based analytics for B2B sales and marketing. Our SMACIntel platform - www.smacintel.com addresses the SMAC (Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud) ecosystem with contextualised business information and intelligence for business leaders.