What is Marketing Intelligence?
Posted on Thu, Jan 19, 2012
In our continued series of blogs written to help clearly distinguish between the various types of intelligence we've addressed Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, and Market Intelligence. In this post we'll focus Marketing Intelligence (MI), which like the others, is also often confused.
But first to a general definition:
On Wikipedia MI is referred to as “the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics. MI is necessary when entering a foreign market. Marketing Intelligence determines the intelligence needed, collects it by searching environment and delivers it to marketing managers who need it.”
Marketing Intelligence is not the same as Market Intelligence (MARKINT), which we wrote about in our previous post.
Hence, Marketing Intelligence professionals often research information and use tools that take data from disparate data sources like web analytics, Business Intelligence, call center and sales data, which often arrive in separate reports. It's the role of Marketing Intelligence to put this data into a single environment. For these reasons, it is often mistakenly perceived to be (or be part of) Business Intelligence. It is also sometimes mistakenly perceived to be (or be part of) Competitive Intelligence because organizationally, Marketing Intelligence can be the name of the department that performs both the market intelligence and competitor analysis roles.
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What do you think? How is MI/CI/CMI/BI organized at your company?