(2.3) Myth 3: Market Intelligence is complex

Admittedly, this is often the case. But not always. Very often the most obvious, readily available information is omitted from the ultimate decision. Take this extract from Amazon, where the book ‘The price of inequality’ of Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is offered by Amazon in new condition, as well as by third parties either in new or in used state:

You don’t have to be an experienced market intelligence professional to see what is wrong here. Did the provider of second hand books even bother to check the price at which the book is offered in new condition by their competitors? Most probably not.

This example can seem to be ridiculously simple, but it is set to make a point: do not omit the bleeding obvious!

To take a less obvious example, let’s look at the Nano, the cheapest car on earth, specially designed by Tata car to serve the vast amount of consumers that are joining the middle class in India each year. It sounds like a no brainer: the market consists of millions of people (and growing by millions each year), so even if only a small portion of them would want to exchange their motorbike for a status symbol such as a car, it would still represent a considerable market opportunity. Still, the sales of the Nano car, at least in the first few years after its introduction, was well below expectations. So what went wrong? A couple of things, apparently, and some were very obvious. For instance, even of the Nano was the cheapest car on earth, it still sold for about a full year’s salary of the middle class consumer it was aiming for, and Tata car omitted to offer the possibility to buy the car through leasing! Sure they must have had good reasons to do so, after all leasing is a completely different business compared to making and selling cars. Nevertheless, this omission certainly forms one of the reasons why the Nano car’s sales figures turned out to be rather disappointing. And it is a reason it could have anticipated even before launching the car.

There are other obvious sources that many professionals are underutilizing in their decision making process. Take competitive information as an example: how many of you are checking the websites of your main competitors on a day-to-day basis? Most of you, hopefully. But how many of you have the newsfeeds of your competitors fed into your RSS feeds? Are you following their activities on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest?

More importantly, are you checking your competitor’s activity on LinkedIn? Do you use this source to check which profiles are leaving them, and which ones are joining? Quite a reliable early warning signal of the strategic choices your competitor is making, even before they communicate about them officially. You can also check which discussion forums your competitors are most active on, which is also an early warning for their future strategic direction.

Last but not least, have you checked your competitors’ activity on Youtube? You would be surprised by the amount of information you can find there, from unofficial interviews with sales managers on trade fairs, to complete speeches of the CEO at an annual sales meeting.

These are all simple tools and activities that can be performed by anybody, but that could tremendously increase the insights on which to build decisions on. And, no, they are not complicated at all…