Over the course of building RivalMap, we've spoken with hundreds of companies about how they use information about their market to form strategy. Market intelligence is the the practice of maintaining an awareness of the market segments in which a company currently or wishes to participate. However, it shouldn't be treated as a formal practice only involving the marketing team. It's being intelligent about your market, and having an awareness of the external variables that impact your company. If you're aware of what your customers want and who competes for those customers, you've done market intelligence. How companies makes use of that kind of information can have a big impact on their success.

Formal definitions of market intelligence break it into four areas: competitors, products, markets, and customers. Having the best information and analysis in all four areas gives your company the ability to make the right decisions. If you don't focus on all areas, you may be too close to the trees to see the forest. If Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, was right in saying strategy is all about resource allocation, setting up a process for maintaining solid market intelligence will greatly influence both the short and long term success of a company. The market variables differ for every industry, but the concept is the same.

We often hear from new startups that obsessing over competitors hinders innovation, but this usually comes from a misperception of the purpose of competitor research and market intelligence. Companies that form strategy based solely on the activity of their competitors are fighting an uphill battle, and will either be constantly playing catch-up, or worrying about being caught. Innovation lies at the core of being an entrepreneur, and the concept of researching an idea before going full speed into creating it never seems attractive. However, starting a business without market intelligence is running blind, and the business risks being hit or miss. Startups can fail for a lot of reasons, but aside from lack of resources, failure can stem from losing market share to competitors, building a solution that doesn't address a real problem, launching in the wrong market, or not knowing the customer. Today more than ever, the short product cycles and rapid development of technology make maintaining an awareness of the market even more crucial, but it can be hard to organize the information and get meaning from it. "See no evil, hear no evil" might work, but what's the risk?

Established companies, especially larger enterprises, face different challenges in remaining globally intelligent about their market. The marketing teams may have an excellent grasp on market intelligence, but are missing the technology foundation to store, organize, and deliver the information to the people that can benefit from it. Market intelligence touches on all aspects of a company. Good product managers build on customer needs, and need to understand what it takes to build loyalty. Sales teams depend on competitive knowledge to win sales, and risk losing when they aren't up to speed on the market. More important than market intelligence being delivered to the workers, it's crucial for a large company to have a way to pull together the knowledge of their workers. But with many different teams working in parallel and a dynamic market with many variables, companies may find their market intelligence practices treat the market like it's in a state of inertia. The marketing team sends processed information out via email, occasionally reports are created, but the process is not dynamic.

Our theory is that companies of all sizes, in all industries, can benefit from a technology that makes their market intelligence more fluid and organized. We'd love to hear how your company currently looks at the market.