Marketing Intelligence

Assessing Market Opportunities

• Assessing opportunities is basic to strategic planning
• In today’s competitive world, making right strategic decisions is
very important
• To make a right decision, it is important to know
• Customers – customer/market potential/segments
• Competitors
• Internal forces
• External forces
• It is therefore very important for the companies to gather these
informations, analyse and then take necessary actions.
• Today you have so many ready to use tools as also can have
customs made programmes for proper analysis
• The role of Marketing Research has become very important for
taking strategic decisions
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Marketing Research
• Design and collection of data
• Analysis of data and finding relevance to specific marketing
situations
• The research is used for;
• Assessing market and sales potential
• Forecasting
• Surveys for getting informations on;
• Feedback on company’s product as also at the time of
introducing new products
• Attitudes and buying practices of the customers
• The above data can be used for planning and controlling
marketing efforts
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Difference between Institutional/Industrial and Consumer

Marketing Research
• Though the basic objectives of research are same but in the
case of industrial products;
• As compared to consumer products, it is more
technically oriented since the customers may be more
knowledgeable and educated
• Since the demand is mainly derived, the secondary data
plays a very important role
• Normally personal interviews are done since the number
of buyers are small and the respondent may not have
time to reply to questionnaire
• Since the buyers may be concentrated at some locations
it is easy to make personal visits to get direct and first
hand informations
• It is easy to get consultants for such surveys than
consumer products and is more dependent and cheaper
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Marketing research
• MR is a process for gathering reliable marketing informations
for proper planning and control
• It provides available Opportunities and Threats and then how
the companies react or act so as to be more effective

Process of MR;
1. Define a problem -
2. Set objectives -
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Information Sources
Secondary data sources
• External published sources like;
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Trade journals
• Web-sites
• Balance sheets and other press reports of the competitors
and other related companies
• Government published data – by ministries and planning
commission
• Agencies involved in research
• Consultancy & advisory bodies and agencies
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Primary data sources

• Unstructured surveys
• Structured surveys
• Individual surveys (including competitors’ employees and
customers)
• Customer surveys (including distributors and dealers)
• Experts survey
• Suppliers survey
• Salesmen reports