Spotlight

The game we are in - can you help us get better?

Let's face it, market intelligence is needed all the time. Why? Well, here is how I see it: 

• Because, you want to find out what is going on around you and how it relates to your business.

• You are relentlessly searching for facts and figures to feed your decision-making and develop your understanding.

• In between, you need market intelligence to help you stop and think for a while: look, reflect and regroup.

• And, you’ll find you need it as a crystal ball to see in which direction the whole circus is heading next.    

 

Many companies dislike buying market intelligence services. They claim it feels like buying a pig in a poke. Comparison is difficult and time consuming. I do understand them. It is just a whole lot of 'Who provides what, to what price and of which quality'? Will it be money well spent or wasted?

It is also difficult to get specific information for your particular industry or market segment or issue. Have you noticed that you often end up buying something much heftier than you wanted and probably, when you get it, it is still off focus or lacks details...  Or alternatively, you end up surrounded by consultants, who have the knowledge, but who fail to present an unbiased view of the market, and who mostly seem to recycle out-of-date information.

So how can we, who are in the business of market research convince our clients that working with us is something quite different? 

We have developed a set of rules for how we want to deliver our market intelligence services:

 

1.        ON THE DOT – The market intelligence has to be of relevance to your problem –otherwise it is worthless.

2.       EASE OF USE – easy to use, easy to understand, easy to distribute in-house. Market intelligence content needs to be versatile and transferable across different communication platforms and presentation formats.

3.        INVESTIGATOR SKILLS - Anyone can get data and information – but you need competence and skills to process and analyze it, to explain what it means, and to make it useful for the rest of your team.  

4.       ONGOING - The best kind of market intelligence is the ongoing sort. It helps you stay on top of things and can help you be more proactive.

5.        FAST DELIVERY – Sometimes it just needs to be done fast and without fuss. Projects with short notice are not new to us.

6.       COST-EFFECTIVENESS – A slim organization, carefully allocated resources and a can-do-attitude are important elements to keep the costs done.

Would you like to comment? Have you any experience from buying market intelligence - particulary in the B2B market in food, nutrition and health?  What benefits do you appreciate? Have you experienced any dissappointments and why? When have you found market intelligence useful?

Market research today

In our current times, market data is widely accessible. Thanks to on-line services, easy-to-use databases and the reach of the internet it is not much of a job to retrieve profuse data. But we find that today´s market intelligence is a far more complex exercise. The raison d'être for companies like us is the task of helping time-starved clients deal with the information and process it into intelligence and insight. In other words - communicate what is relevant and make it useable!

What makes good market intelligence?
Conducting market intelligence is an increasingly complicated task and requires professional knowledge and skills. For instance, one needs to know how to retrieve information and exploit databases. We think databases are good tools, but you also need craftsmanship to generate something with them. Equally important is to pick the most appropriate sources -primary and secondary, as well as the right methods. Further, good market intelligence always needs customisation, because the need of one client is never exactly the same as the other. Experience is of course crucially important - as well as specific knowledge of the field you are working with. Every industry has its own logic and dynamics. We readily realise our limitations and have therefore decided to define our field of expertise as the life sciences industry. To be able to provide good solutions, we think a service provider needs to be familiar with the reality of its client. Our clearly defined market doesn´t lessen our ambitions though! We have a clear ambition of becoming the premier provider of market intelligence - within nutrition, health and wellbeing.

The benefits of outsourcing
Your in-house staff can achieve a lot - no doubt. However, there are some advantages of using an independent service provider. First of all, decision-makers themselves seldom have the time to search and process vast amounts of market information. Therefore it is preferable to outsource these tasks to trained professionals who have the routines and experience to do this without spending too much time and resources. Also, by using a professional market intelligence service provider, the client can test and validate its own understanding of the market, gain new perspectives and accuracy, and reduce some of the uncertainness of the decision-making process.