Executive summary. Delivering Maximum Strategic Value with Market Monitoring, страница 4

The main benefit from making any type of market monitoring system future oriented is that it enables the decision-makers to become proactive instead of merely remaining reactive. What is more, to be proactive means two different things. First, it means to be proactive in relation to the environment, in other words, taking action before an event takes place. But what might be more relevant in many situations is taking actions before the competition does. Ideally of course, it means both.

Being able to grasp opportunities early on when, say, a new consumer trend emerges, regulation changes, or new technologies are introduced, is valuable in itself. But being able to capture these opportunities before the competitors do gives a company the additional first-mover benefits of market share, high margins, or improved brand image.

With a forward-looking system in place, the company is able to anticipate the event which enables it to take action and allocate resources before the event occurs and before the competition acts. This way the company may be able to pre-empt competitive action as well as capture higher market shares and higher margins.

There is, however, one caveat. In case the market monitoring system, however future-oriented it may be, is not reaching its intended audience or the decision-makers in the company are not committed to act based on the delivered information, then action is not taken even though critical events can be foreseen. This is illustrated in the picture below.

It is therefore vital that the decision-making structures in the company are receptive and responsive to the signals that the market monitoring system provides. This requires two things:

•  Top management commitment

•  Integration with functional processes

The latter point means that the market monitoring system should be sensitive to the various functions in an organization, as each of them has different intelligence needs and their own types of decisions to make. If the market intelligence system is not integrated into the specific decision-making structures of each corporate function, detection of marketplace events does not lead to actions and opportunities are missed.

5 THE BIG PICTURE OF THE MARKET

MONITORING PROCESS

Any kind of market monitoring process follows a certain basic logic which is illustrated below. The three fundamental stages of the process are the sourcing of information, the processing of information into intelligence deliverables, and the delivery of the intelligence deliverables to decision-makers. Within each of these stages there are a plethora of variations, but the basic structure of the process is fairly universal.

Let us call the basic unit of information a market signal.^[2]  The market monitoring process is thus a system for capturing market signals from a variety of sources, processing these signals into an actionable format, and then delivering the processed signals to decision-makers.

It is very important to understand that the incoming signals are different from the outgoing signals and that there is transformation of signals taking place in the middle. This realization alone sometimes leads to significant improvements in the quality of the process, as many times market monitoring processes are set up simply to redirect the incoming signals to the decisionmakers without any kind of processing in between. The result is that decision-makers end up receiving raw data which is not understandable or actionable as such and much of which is without any real value at all.