Marketing Intelligence

This article is about Marketing Intelligence. For the military use such information, see Market Intelligence (MARKINT).

Marketing Intelligence (MI) is 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. Marketing intelligence is necessary when entering a foreign market. Marketing Intelligence is not the same as Market Intelligence (MARKINT).

Marketing Intelligence determines the intelligence needed, collects it by searching environment and delivers it to marketing managers who need it. Marketing intelligence software can be deployed using an on-premises or Software as a Service (SaaS, or cloud-based) model. These systems take data from disparate data sources, like web analytics, Business Intelligence, call center and sales data, which often come separate reports, and put them into a single environment. Marketing managers can design reports that correlate and visualize data coming from a variety of departments and sources (even, in some cases, external data.) This allows them to see current key performance indicators in real time (or as quickly as sources provide data) and analyze trends, rather than wait for analysts to deliver periodic reports.

Marketing Intelligence systems are designed to be used by marketing managers and often viewed by employees throughout an organization. They may have user interfaces that closer resemble consumer software than the software around individual data sources, which are designed for use by analysts. Business Intelligence for example, can collect highly accurate, timely, granular data, but often requires IT support to build and edit custom reports.

Organizationally, Marketing Intelligence can be the name of the department that performs both the market intelligence and competitor analysis roles. Competitive Intelligence describes the broader discipline of researching, analyzing and formulating data and information from the entire competitive environment of any organization. Business Intelligence of any kind may also be their responsibility, in tandem with (or solely performed by) the Finance department, for measuring market share and setting growth targets, the Mergers & Acquisition group for exploring acquisition opportunities, the Legal department to protect the organization's assets or R&D for cross-company comparison of innovation trends and the discovery of opportunities through innovative differentiation.