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TopBackground
Strategic planning and execution are two main contexts where market intelligence is definitely relevant for critical decisions, motivating the following evaluation as the start of this theoretical work.
Strategic Decision Scenarios and Its Demands for Continuous Knowledge
Strategy formulation and execution are knowledge-dependent tasks, demanding for its continuity reliable and updated knowledge availability (Jamil et al., 2012; Johnson, 2012; Dimitrios, Sakas & Vlachos, 2013).
Strategic marketing decisions are the objective of the MI process, as the knowledge provision aims to solve problems, allowing decisions with clearer risk delimitations and implementation results with better customer aggregated value perspectives, attending to the basic organizational marketing demands (Kotler & Keller, 2005; Schiffman & Kanuk, 2010; Ferrel & Hartline, 2010; De Man, 2012). Typical decisions of strategic marketing processes that can benefit from market intelligence process are: product line configuration and distribution, pricing, advertising and general communication, differentiation as a value-based strategy and marketing channel analysis. As examples of knowledge needed in usual marketing decisions it can be perceived: consumer behavior details, demographic perspectives and constraints, customer reaction to distribution forms and communication, distribution channels performance and financial performance for all productive chain components.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Marketing: An integrated organizational discipline oriented to aggregate value for product and services, considering customers wishes and needs.
Market Intelligence: A continuous organizational process that intends to produce knowledge for strategic marketing planning, collecting data from a value-aggregate chain, validating, processing and communicating the final results in a standardized way.
Competitive Intelligence: An organizational process which aims helping to solve strategic problems and decisions through data and information collection, validation, analysis and results production.
Knowledge Management: A process that intends to administrate the creation, retention and registering, sharing, valuating, monitoring and application of knowledge in organizations.
Strategic Marketing Planning: A part of the marketing planning process which intends to connect the strategic goals expressed in organizational strategic planning to tactical marketing specifications, which will lead to product or services definitions, prices, promotion and distribution.