UTS/Jeremy Nathaniel Gunawan/14416030

UJIAN TENGAH SEMESTER MR4002 Intelijen Pasar

Marketing Intelligence: What, Why and How

Jeremy Nathaniel Gunawan/ MRI/ 14416030

1. Introduction
Technological changes and development such as social media had enable organizations
to gain and generate data and information faster than ever before (McAfee, 2012). In parallel
with that, many decision-makers feel the symptoms of an information paralysis (Hedin,
Hirvensalo, & Vaarnas, 2011). Data and information will only aid marketing decision when
organizations can find relevant data and turning it insight. According to Ettorre, “marketing
intelligence was about staying one step ahead of the competition by gathering information
which could be converted to actionable intelligence and which can then be applied to both short
term and long term strategic planning” (Ettorre, 1995). That is why marketing intelligence is
an important aspect for organizations strategy and success (Wright & Calof, 2006). This essay
will focus on the ways of taking advantage of current technological developments to improve
organizations marketing intelligence.

2. Marketing Intelligence Theory

2.1. Marketing Intelligence Terms
Marketing intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with business intelligence
and market research. The three terms refer to different meanings from each other. Referring to
the definition of marketing intelligence stated by ettorre above, marketing intelligence is the
process of gathering information about the market and convert it to actionable intelligence to
gain competitive advantage. Business intelligence in most cases refers to intelligence gathering
process by processing numerical business data (Hedin, Hirvensalo, & Vaarnas, 2011) and on
the other hand, market research is a specific assessment of a particular market dynamic such as
market size, product, and customer preference by answering specific research question.
By using the definition of those three terms, we can safely conclude that both market
intelligence and business intelligence are done continuously as an ongoing iterative process to
gain insight from data, the difference are market intelligence focus on the holistic approach of
the market environment and business intelligence deals with the company alone. Market
research and marketing intelligence both focus on getting market information, but both are
different in the process where, in market research there is a set of task and objectives to be
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addressed, while in market intelligence information are gathered beyond market research and
in a continuous manner with no specific question to be answered. Knowing the differences of
the terms matter because being able to distinguish and combining the three different approach
in business will help organizations grow. Business intelligence could be used to tell if
organization are running effectively and the areas to improve, market research could be used
to answer specific market questions and marketing intelligence could be used to gain market
information and create actionable insight. The constant changes of the market and the
technological development to gain market information have been growing lately, therefore, to
address those situations this essay will be focused solely on marketing intelligence.
2.2. Importance of Marketing Intelligence
Most of the existing literature of marketing intelligence usually addresses specific
technical aspects of the marketing intelligence activities, such as information collection
techniques and analysis methods. However, the most important questions that organizations
face when considering the options for organizing intelligence activity are rather more strategic
rather than technical methods and techniques, therefore the importance of marketing
intelligence activities must be clearly stated for considerations. There are three main benefits
that the organizations will get by systematically organizing marketing intelligence activities,
which are better and faster decisions, time and cost savings, and organizational learning and
new ideas (Hedin, Hirvensalo, & Vaarnas, 2011). Each benefit will be elaborated in the
following paragraphs.
Based on the research that on 11 good to great companies by Jim Collins, confronting
facts are one of the main distinguishing factors that enables some organization to be able to
undertake better decisions (Collins, 2005). Marketing intelligence are one of way to help
organization to know and understand better about the fact, therefore, faster and better decision
are the causal impact of it. However, it is hard to quantify which marketing intelligence efforts
contributed to which successful decisions and by how much (Hedin, Hirvensalo, & Vaarnas,
2011). Those benefits are considered as qualitative benefits, however it is safe to say that an
organized marketing intelligence program will reducing uncertainty in decision making thus
improves the average quality of decisions made. Better decisions are made by using research-
based insights to take decisions and to eliminate risks. Faster decisions are achieved through
faster understanding of the situations that will avoid surprises and having the capability of
making educated decisions under time pressure.
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The second benefits are time and cost savings. Based on the case study that are taken
from Dobney market research and intelligence consultancy, a waste disposal startup client is
successful in identifying profitable waste streams (Dobney, n.d.). It led to successfully getting
high quality disposal thus prevents the company from taking wrong directions that will result
in un-efficient usage of resource and time. Unlike decision-making impacts, the efficiency of
an intelligence program can be quite accurately measured in both time and money. Time
savings are achieved by reducing time spend to react on un-accurate or un-complete
information. Cost savings are achieved by avoiding inefficiencies and redundancies in
purchasing and processing business information.
Organizational learning and new ideas are both are the results of shared understanding
of the organization about the environment. Both benefits are derived directly in the process of
using gathered information to make decision. Organizational learning achieved through
continuously exposing employees to new intelligence and facilitating insight creation. New
ideas achieved through collectively identifying emerging opportunities, threats and strategic
themes based on the gathered insight.
2.3. Taking Advantage of Current Development in Marketing Intelligence
In this essay we have addressed what is marketing intelligence and why it is important.
There have been a lot of existing literature that explore technical approach of using marketing
intelligence in organizations. Rather than discussing the technical approach, this essay will
explore ways to take advantage of current econometrics, statistical models, artificial
intelligence, machine learning and electronic, information, and telecommunication technology
advancement. To explore the advantage, this essay will be referring to the 5 Key Steps to
Develop Marketing Intelligence Strategy by Frost and Sullivan (Webb, Steven;, 2012). The 5
steps are: Define Intelligence Requirements Collate Data  Analysis Disseminate
Action. Collation and analysis of data are the core skill sets of Marketing Intelligence (Webb,
Steven;, 2012). This essay will be focused on taking advantage in both steps.
2.3.1. Taking Advantage in Collating Data
Collating data are the process of collecting and combining data for the purpose of
marketing intelligence. New advancements have made collating data more effective and
efficient. There are various ways that an organization could use in collating data which will be
elaborated below.
Current industry 4.0 development have enabled internet of things to gather data at a big
magnitude that have never been seen before (Chui, Löffler, & Roberts, n.d.). Marketing
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intelligence relies on collection of data and right now data are available everywhere. There are
three main aspect of internet of things that can be used in marketing intelligence, which are
electronics, information and telecommunication technology.
Electronics technology, especially sensors in tagging technology and connectivity
enabled (IOT) devices have become the new source of data. Different then data that are
collected through primary market research, IOT data are much reliable in giving unbiased
response. Each IOT devices can monitor what, when, and how users are interacted with the
technology. That monitoring of users interactions will be an advantage to marketing
intelligence to collect more relevant data. There are various applications for each industry.
Some of the applications are manufacturing firms can use IOT products to identify customer
behavior and create new experience and products that are relevant to the customer and retail
industries can use RFID and tagging technologies to gain user behaviors and create new
retailing experience for the customer. The data that are collected with the electronics
technology will be useless without the advancement of information technology to collect and
prepare the data. Right now the emerging fields of big data in IT have made those information
that are collected by the electronics to be used using big data analytics are available for (Singh
& Reddy, 2015). Furthermore, the telecommunication technology development in 5G
technologies will enables big data to be extracted faster and organizations can collect and
analyze it real time. The application of those technology will enable more accurate and up to
date data to be available for research.
Other than IOT devices, artificial intelligence and machine learning advancement can
be use as advantage for automating data collection and selection in marketing intelligence. One
of the applications of machine learning are data mining by utilizing data crawling and data
scraping techniques which can automate assembly of research data (Massimino, 2016). AI
enables data analyst to collect only relevant data. Taking advantage of it will reducing the time
to collecting and cleaning data.
2.3.2. Taking Advantage in Analysis
Collation of data are only useful if it is analyzed properly and decision makers can use
the insight gained. Current advancement in econometrics and statistical model can be use as
advantage to gain meaningful insights from those data. There are 6 main statistical modelling
method that can be used, which are time series that can be used to compare events and history
data, market segmentation, recommendation system which use filtering systems that predict
the preference of a user for an item, attribution modelling to analyze each event in customer
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journey, incremental attribution by using decision tree analysis to predict the difference that a
marketer's actions will make on the behavior of customers, supervised learning using
classification and regression techniques to predict output with input variables (Mehdi
Farhangian , 2017). Those tools can benefit organizations to give more accurate insight about
the market environment.
Other than that, there have been various ways in using AI and machine learning to
analyze data. One of the examples are by utilizing Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD)
method, which consist of data selection, preprocessing, transformation, mining, and
evaluation (Frawley, Piatetsky-Shapiro, & Matheus, 1992). Other than that, current data
processing tools such as R and Python have enabled machine learning for faster and automated
data analysis (Hothorn, 2018).

3. Illustration of Possible Marketing Intelligence Usage in HTC

Marketing intelligence are one of the tools that can be used to improve a
company/organization performance. The best marketing intelligence programs could create
true impact on business and help companies generate revenue. In this part of the essay, HTC,
a consumer electronics company that are renowned for producing smartphones, will be used as
a case study.
3.1. Background on HTC
HTC originally started with producing windows smartphone on 1998-2007. In 20078 it
become the producer of the google android smartphone. It quickly growing in popularity, with
Apple, HTC leads new wave of smartphone brands. HTC have build a desired brand for quality
products. HTC peaked during 2011, where it has 8.8% of market shares and become one of the
leading smartphone brands in the US, with stock prices hit $1,300 a piece. After the peak, HTC
went on a down spiral. After several effort to spent in investment and partnership, it still led to
failure in smartphone markets. In 2018 some reports stated that HTC only holds less than a half
of smartphone market shares and stock prices below $40 a piece.
Data and analysis from Tech in Asia, The Overspill, Asymco, and IDC stats from 2008 to the
present day.
3.2. HTC Problems
The contents in this section are accumulated from various reviews and article from the
internet. From several articles, it is stated that HTC R&D have no problems in developing new
technology and features, in fact it was one of the best and HTC continuously succeeded in
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creating high quality products. So, what exactly happened that led the HTC to a downward
spiral? I have identified and construct some problems that HTC faced, which are:
 Xiaomi and Samsung destroyed HTC’s early advantage in china
 Failed to market products competitive advantage
 Failed in managing product portfolio
 Failed advertising that was outmarketed by Samsung huge ad budget
 It was beaten on specs at the top-end and on price in the budget range
 Failed to fend off new entrant
3.3. Recommendation of Marketing Intelligence Initiative to Solve HTC
Problems
In the last section, all identified problems that HTC faced are marketing related. In this
case, marketing intelligence can be used extensively to address those problem. To create an
organized marketing initiative, this this initiative are best applicated by following the five steps
methodology by Frost and Sulivan that have been stated above (Define Intelligence
Requirements Collate Data  Analysis Disseminate Action) to create actionable
marketing intelligence initiative to resolve their problem. Generally, there are two main
recommendation to solve HTC problems, which are: Customer monitoring, Market monitoring
and Intelligence portal.
Customer monitoring takes form of continuously monitoring customer behavior and
experience related to HTC product usage and perceptions of HTC products. It can be done
through the usage of data mining techniques to monitor customer perceptions (such as
sentiment analysis in social media) both in social media and the internet, which could be used
to identify customer needs. To monitor current user of the products, HTC could use product
usage report from the user. By receiving those data, HTC could identify new product feature
and perform various analysis.
Market monitoring takes form in continuous and standardized monitoring of the market
environment which includes competitor monitoring. HTC intelligence team produces up to date
market data for the organization to stay relevant in the business environment. Market
monitoring monitors also could be used to identify various market signals and different types
of reviews. Other than that market monitoring is essential in getting new market trend insights
for new product development and analyzing the organizations strategic moves.the .
Intelligence Portal initiatives are Knowledge Management platform that takes form as
storage and delivery software for Market Intelligence content that stores the information in an
organized manner and makes it accessible to organizations. The intelligence portal enables
HTC decision maker to pull information from the portal based on their needs. Intelligence
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portals get information based on gathered marketing intelligence insight. This initiative are
important to make sure that insights are received by decision maker.
Those 3 recommendations than can be followed up by performing analysis such as:
 Mergers, acquisitions, and divestments opportunity
 Portfolio analysis
 Market share and regional competitive position
 Competitor profile and benchmarking
 Global Market Trend Insight
 Product feature analysis, Customer Attribution Model
 Incremental Attribution of marketing advertisement

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