Marketing intelligence: The white-collar sleuth

Patricia Susanto, Business Development Manager, Jakarta Consulting Group

Creeping slowly and stealthily into the darkened room, he turns on his flash light, aiming it in all directions, and clumsily trips over a box of neatly filed folders.

He then greedily scans the documents, snapping pictures with his state-of-the-art digital camera, hurrying as his watch beeping reminds him that he has spent too long in the filing room.

As quietly as possible he closes the door and tries to walk casually toward his sports car. Once he gets into the car, he hooks up his camera to his PDA and downloads the newly acquired data and sends it in the form of encrypted data to his computer in the office.

This is an exaggerated version of what frequently happens in today's business world.

The term marketing intelligence has been used in business jargon for years. Unfortunately the understanding of it has been vague. Some think of James Bond, others think of analyzing data intelligently. Actually what it really means is the use of processed data, including data from the market, competitors, trends, and environmental information for future strategic planning and decision making activities.

Which is the most important, how do we process it and what will we do with it? There our raw business instinct helps us.

We, for example, sought forbidden data, that of the competitor. If we can, we will put them out of business, at least jeopardize their existence, so that we can be number one. We have to excel and nothing can stand between us and that.

For this, we do underhand things to get ahead. We would prod our competitor's employees for information, entertain them until they can't think straight anymore and start spilling company secrets and then dump them after we get what we need.

Some even dare to go through the trash pile, taking all information that they can get. We poach each other employees and pay them more than they are actually worth just to get information.

But no matter what we do, it seems that the competitor is always ahead; the grass is always greener on the other side.

The results of the Conference Board Survey in 1988, indicate that 65 percent of marketing intelligence activities are related to the monitoring of competitors and the other 12 percent relates to activities in developing an effective monitoring system.

Based on this data, we can see how the "James Bond" image has been attributed to the practice of gathering marketing intelligence data.

We want to be slick in the act of obtaining information, and we worm the information out of our competitor. But then, sometimes we still hear the voice of conscience. The little sound in our head whispers that stealing, no matter how intelligently we do it, is still stealing.

According to recent research on marketing intelligence, 94 percent of the processed data comes from the media, customers, and trade. Only 6 percent comes from intelligence activities.

The survey indicates that our daily rituals such as reading newspapers, clipping articles from magazines, watching the news, browsing the Internet and maintaining our customers are an important part of marketing intelligence activities.