Small and Medium Sized Businesses – Developing Your Market Intelligence


Nearly every industry is signifcantly more competitive today that it was only a few years ago. Many companies focus on doing their thing a little bit faster or better than they did last year. But in today’s hyper-competitive environment that may not always be enough. We believe that there are three pillars of Business Intelligence that are given short shrift by many companies, and by ignoring these options, they put their company’s future in peril.

The three pillars of Market Intelligence are Competitive Intelligence, Secondary Market Intelligence (syndicated or research that can be found or purchased on an given industry) and Primary Market Research – which is conducting research that is specifically designed to answer the questions that your business is grappling with – and that your competitors should never see (because it’s proprietary information).

COMPETITOR ASSESSMENT

It’s important to do a basic SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on each of your key competitors to understand their positions in the market relative to that of your own company (financial position, apparent growth directions, likely profit margins and the threats that their business is facing). There are companies that specialize in gathering competitive information, and it’s pretty common to spend a couple of months and several thousand dollars to get a report on a number of key competitors.

However, because the number of competitors is often very small, it’s often possible to do some gumshoeing on your own. When does your competitor open for business, when do they close, how many customers do they get in the morning, afternoon an evening, and how much does it look like they’re buying? Go in and ask them about their best selling product, buy one and see what they’ve got. You can also do a lot of this research via the web, or by the phone.

Look at the city records to see who owns the land, have a realtor friend estimate what the rent would be like on that size building in that part of town. Look at the equipment they have, and the stock that that they carry, count the number of employees. You can probably do a pretty good job of estimating their revenue and even projecting their profit. It’s a good businessperson who has an idea of how their business stacks up.

SECONDARY MARKET RESEARCH

These are the companies that make their money by keeping tabs on the industry overall and try to understand which major competitors are doing well and which are in bad shape. Many can approximate market shares by talking to companies that provide raw goods or by talking to the channels that these companies sell through. Some of these analysts will estimate whether the overall business is growing or shrinking and are brave enough to project these numbers out for several years.

The types of companies that track these industries include International Data Corporation, Dataquest, and don’t forget industry groups. Many of these reports are combined at one wonderful website that can help you quickly find reports on every industry under the sun - Market Research. This is probably the fastest place to find quality information on your industry overall, although it's not free, unfortunately.

PRIMARY MARKET RESARCH

Once you know about your industry, you may decide that you’d like to know more about the specific products or services that you’re developing. Or maybe you just want to find out what kinds of customers are purchasing your products, how happy they are with them, or what their likelihood is of buying another product from you in the future. That’s where Primary Market Research comes in.

Primary research entails a couple of dozen different methods of getting customers feedback, depending on what access they have to technology, where they are located in the world, the sensitivity of the topic and whether you think that group synergy would get you a better answer than you would by speaking to a customer one at a time. There are also a few unique methods to probe on other areas, for example there is “lost customer” research, which finds customers that purchased another company’s products and then probing on why they didn’t go with your products.

Anyway there are a number of ways to get at most any type of business issue that you have. Together these techniques can help a savvy business manager to ensure that they keep a finger on the puse of the market in which they operate - and therby keeping their positiion in that market safer!

Our website: http://www.marketresearch101.com can help you understand the terminology of research, the pros and cons of different research methods and we can even help you find a researcher that fits your needs. And we’re entirely independent and don’t have financial relationships with any of the market research vendors.

Intelligent! Insightful! Your website is packed full of information. Thank you for sharing.

Chris Hawkes,

Your company essay is well crafted. I was thrown when I read the first "we" because I hadn't realized I was reading a corporate communication.

I'm an advocate of consumer research.

I hope you don't mind my plugging a vendor I truly respect... Seena Sharp. Seena is a master of secondary research. She has a collection of special reports she has posted here... Sharp Market Intelligence - SharpInsights

Mr. Hawkes, if I were in a position to send you an RFP, I certainly would.

From a professional perspective, you are buttoned-up. I should qualify my credentials...

I've moderated over 1,000 focus groups. Joe Grieco was my first boss, and you should know that my opinions are not necessarily shared by him or any of my other bosses or colleagues.

I was a project director at Lieberman Research Worldwide (LRW) where among other studies I worked on "The Nag Study" as seen in the documentary The Corporation...
Amazon.com: The Corporation: DVD: Mikela J. Mikael,Maude Barlow,Pope John XXIII,Martha Stewart (II),Kofi Annan,Michael Moore (II),Susan E. Linn,George W. Bush,Carlton Brown,Jonathan Ressler,Nelson Mandela,V.I. Lenin,Jane Akre,Martin Luther King,Noam Chomsky,Winston Churchill,Ken Starr,Smedley Darlington Butler,Frank Gifford,Mahatma Gandhi,Jennifer Abbott,Mark Achbar

Why do I bring all this up?
Because I have given serious thought to the role of proprietary information.

I want to inquire into your notion of "proprietary information"...

I first began questioning the role of proprietary information when LRW assigned me to work on studies for The Church of Scientology. I began wondering if one church should have memetic technology that others did not have.

What if we switch categories?
What if we discuss vaccines and think about the Bird Flu. If the Bird Flu became a plague would you still hold that the proprietary information required to make the vaccine should never be seen by competitors?

I'm confident that if I held a different perspective on ownership that I would have a much larger balance in my bank accounts... okay, one of which is overdrawn.

Most people can't see that Fair Tax, Flat Tax and Regressive Tax are three labels for the same construct. I discuss this specific positioning in my upcoming book... Amazon.com: Think Two Products Ahead: Secrets the Big Advertising Agencies Don't Want You to Know and How to Use Them for Bigger Profits: Books: Ben Mack

Why do I make such a big stink about the application of proprietary ideas?

At the end of the day, we create killer ideas, ideas that can literally kill our competition or when used to justify government actions can kill millions of people.

I'm often accused of splitting hairs or that my arguments are "just semantic."

LITTLE MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL...
like somebody telling me desmissively that I'm being semantic.

MY SERIOUS QUESTION IS...
Should churches have proprietary information?

"Religion is the opiate of the masses." Karl Marx, Philosopher (1818 - 1883).

Was Marx denying a higher-power or was he arguing that organized religion was making the working man compliant to the whims of their oppressors? By asking this question I am framing a debate on Marx, suggesting that the answers are mutually exclusive. This is marketing rhetoric. I’m positioning Marx’s comment as this or that.

Marketing affects behavior or it’s not good marketing. Behaviors are changed by altering perceptions. When we see things differently we act differently. Beliefs, attitudes and constructions of categories are the primary levers of shifting perception. Marketing manipulates the meaning of symbols, images and associations. Marketing is applied semantics.

Semantic adj: of or relating to the study of meaning and changes of meaning; "semantic analysis" (WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University)

Propaganda is marketing. Many Americans are waking up from a propaganda induced coma yelling, "They lied!" Great. Many of these same folks then rant about the evils of propaganda. I respect their anger. But, bashing propaganda strengthens the control of the world’s greatest oppressor, our present form of world government, Corporatocracy.

My comments on this subject are regularly dismissed as “merely semantic.” This perspective is blind. In business semantic analysis is often called consumer research, a $100,000,000,000/year business. That figure does not include the trillions of dollars required to leverage the insights garnered through consumer research.

Distinguishing propaganda from marketing is like holding a distinction between drugs and alcohol, it's a semantic distinction. There are billions of dollars to be lost if alcohol is lumped in with drugs, and there are trillions of dollars to be lost if Corporatocracy is held accountable for crimes against humanity.

Semantics is the heart of marketing. While semantics is the analyses of change in meaning, marketing is about controlling the change.

Meaning is not limited to words, but words are a common way we discuss meaning. Wittgenstein asserts he can only know things for which he has a word:

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher (1889 - 1951)

But, it works the other way, too. Having two words can blind people from seeing that separate labels represent the same idea. Distinguishing drugs and alcohol is an obvious example. A subtle example can be found in mathematics: elliptic curves and modular forms. Having two separate labels so blinded the mathematical community that the original conjecture by Taniyama and Shimura was universally ridiculed by the their professional community, compelling Taniyama to commit suicide. Why do I bring this up? Because, math is supposed to be immune to psychological tricks and politicking. Because, suicide is only a particular of the stakes of this discussion. Genocide is the real stake of this of this game.

Propaganda is the feel-good pill of fascism. That’s my modern interpretation of: "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Propaganda is what facilitates fascist citizens to believe they’re supporting what’s good and right. The keystone of manufacturing these beliefs is in controlling meaning. Words become the crux of this control.

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." Philip K. Dick, Novelist (1928-1982)

This is a war for reality. Consensus reality is held in place by the masses. The commonly used words and their common meanings have great impact. Monitoring these meanings and affect changing is the key to Lippman’s phrase, “manufacturing consent.”

Words change. A trunk is now a place on my car where I store stuff. The word trunk came from wooden box. There is some similarity in meaning, but the word trunk has a very different meaning today. The trunk word evolved. It does help us to understand its origins to see the distinction while using the same sound, the same word, but the two different meanings suggest we currently have two distinct memes.

Words evolving on their own is very different from engineering the misuse of a word. I’m not talking about the misues of the word incredible which no longer means not-credible, but extraordinary. I’m talking, or writing, about words like dividend. Ever get a dividend from your insurance company when you weren’t an owner of their stock? I’ve met scores of people that have and they were thrilled that their company would profit-share. Dividend can mean profits to share holders, but in insurance it means it also means a refund because the insurance company charged a customer more than they were legally allowed. I was paid to interview these consumers. I’m a professional consumer researcher.

Litigating the word dividend makes the receipt of these overage-refund-checks a way of endearing customers with their law-breaking insurance vendor.

Insurance companies hijacked an existing word with good meanings to use for something that might otherwise be viewed as bad to the consumer—an insurance premium that is not only not competitive it is criminally too much to charge. If the insurance company didn’t refund this money an executive could be indicted.

Is this bad? Yes, it is very bad, for the company. The fiduciary responsibility of the company’s executives is to make as much money as it can. Giving money back to consumers who haven’t asked for a refund is at odds with making as much money as they can. This would pain a company, but companies don’t have feelings.

Who will help us fight propaganda? Corporations. Corporations are not only willing to help us fight propaganda, if we reach a critical mass they’ll flame the passions of the fight. As they market the need to fight propaganda, they’ll sell us all the equipment we need. As they investigate our fight against propaganda, they monitor and affect its usage.

Bashing propaganda appears to me like demonizing street drugs, gerrymandering the mental landscape to favor corporate products. I’ve seen argued that propaganda is employed by governments to garner consensus while advertising is the marketing of corporations, to make money. This is a vacuous distinction.

The Catholic Church coined the word 'propaganda' so I don’t think limiting propaganda to governments is correct. Even if we granted The Church as a form of government, this was a term created as a means of saving money. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV commissioned the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. One of Pope Gregory’s accountants came to the conclusion that it was more cost effective to teach Catholicism than to invade and force conversion. The accountant had the insight to recognize that a territory could be acquired by converting people’s minds. If you convert the minds, the bodies will follow. And, converting minds is less expensive than physically enforcing new sovereignty.

When Karl Marx used the word religion, religion didn’t mean spirituality. Religion was the mental rationale that gave a monarch power. Religion was the excuse for a power elite to be entitled to do anything because ordinary humans were in no position to question authority emanating from God. Religion pacified masses from complain about the inequalities of power hierarchies and the atrocities of the elites.

The nature of propaganda is magic. Magic is the act of facilitating an immersive experience, perhaps best encapsulated by the word phantasmagorical. Something is phantasmagorical when an audience transcends their skepticism and accepts a world where the laws of nature don’t have such a firm grasp on reality. In advertising, copy can become phantasmagorical when it is stoking the passions of a diehard fan, helping them envision driving a golf ball 300 yards or bringing them into a moment of sports history that they can recollect with vivid details.

Magic can be a scary word. Last week, I was moderating a focus group among nurses of a children’s hospital and the word “magic” came up and a participant asked that we not use the word magic because it made her uncomfortable. To many, the word magic evokes a threat of eternal damnation. To these people, a magician is a spiritual terrorist, striking out to infect the unsuspecting.

I paid my way through college as a magician. There are many people who hold magic as evil. Occasionally, some audience member would want to talk to me and get me to repent and save my soul. I can’t quantify how many of these folks there are, what the incidence is, but the October 11, 2005 USA Today reported that 53% of Americans believe “God created human beings in their present form exactly as described in the Bible”. If you figure half of these folks see the word magic as demonic, that’s approximately ¼ of all Americans. So the word magic should be used with discretion. Shakespeare reminds us: the better half of valor is discretion.

So why discuss magic? There is real power in magic. Moreover, magic was the terrorism of the 17th Century. Early scholars of magic and perception were persecuted and killed. If I had used the word executed there, it would have depicted a government sanctioned killing. If I had used the word murder, there would be an illicit connotation. Word choice effects how we process information.

Word choice is a form of magic. Words create our immersive realities.

Magic theory is littered with big words like prestidigitation, a word intentionally made cryptic which means the act of quick fingers. Prestidigitation was coined by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a 16th-century classic that attempted to disprove the existence of witches by detailing the charges against women who supposedly practiced the black arts. Scot wanted to present a scientific account of what these women were doing and so he used Latin, the language of science. Presto means quick, digits means fingers, ation is the act there of—prestidigitation, now known as sleight of hand.

The psychology of perception has not long been openly studied. Science that challenged the cosmography (world view) of The Church was labeled as heretical, illegal, and often punishable by death. I reiterate: to this day, the idea of magic is offensive to many. (continued... in my auto-responder... gar!)

(... continued from above (minus AR essay))

I respect the scientist Aleister Crowley who said, “We attribute to magick that which we don’t understand.”

Magic is not a thing or a physical act, but a state of mind that approaches the sublime but is more aptly referred to as phantasmagorical. Magic occurs at the intersection of a performer and an audience. There is intentionality to the perception. A stone that looks like an eagle is not magic, regardless of whether or not it is carved to represent the physical traits of an eagle. A sculpture maybe a catalyst to an altered state of mind, but I am reticent to call a sculpture magical. Some panoramas feel almost magical to me, but real magic is dynamic and ephemeral. Magic is the process of engineering an experience where reality emerges as it cannot be, and yet the audience is compelled to set aside their disbelief and flow with the experience as long as it lasts.

Creating theatrical magic entails tweaking our visual prejudices. We drop a coin, and it falls. We know this to be true; we’ve seen the force of gravity pull objects to Earth since before we had words to articulate the phenomena. What most non-perceptual psychologists DON’T recognize is the extent that our mind projects our expectations, our visual prejudices, onto our sight. If a magician creates the physical gesture of dropping a coin from one hand to another, yet palms the coin so it doesn’t actually fall into the second hand, most minds will see the coin fall. The term for this sight projection is sight retention. A normal mind will literally “see” the coin fall. This specific visual hallucination is called a projection, our mind projects its expectation of reality onto our sight. The magician makes note of the triggers that cause these visual breaks from reality and assembles a presentation that often includes a series of these triggers, often strung together through a narrative known as patter. The magician is an actor playing the role of a person with supernatural powers.

Projection is a powerful force. We not only see what we expect to see, but often our expectations create our reality. The doctor mentioned earlier was explaining this dynamic, that a doctor’s expectation of results had a higher correlation to a patient’s success than any other element tested. I would tell your readers what Grant Morrison recommended, Fake it till you make it. My Bennington College buddy Bill Scully of VermontFineDining.com said that our college buddy Tom Dunn, a genius artist who is now being recognized, said, Bill, we’re finally doing stuff that is big enough to fit our egos. I’ve known Bill and Tom for 13 years. We each knew we were good. We also were regularly the only ones working at 3AM. Expectation drives determination, hard work reinforces expectation. Grounded planning and stewardship of business plans helps. Scientifically testing your efforts and changing courses is worth the effort. Burning a colored candle is not likely to make money appear unless other preparations are in place, namely smart hard work.

If expectation of success is powerful, the willing suspension of disbelief is powerful. Theatre and magic generate a willing suspension of disbelief creating a magical frame of mind. Phantasmagoria is magic. A phantasmagoric effect generated a magical frame of mind.

Magic can be created from afar. A person who engineers a magical frame of mind, phantasmagoria, for an audience may or may not be a performer on a stage. If the person who engineered a magical experience is not the actor presenting the feats, they are the meme-wranglers of the experience. Clock makers of the 17th Century created automatons, mechanical men whose gears and riggings could be activated to perform the tricks of magicians. These clock makers were not magicians; they were the meme-wranglers of their metal figurines that could perform magic, even in the absence of their creators.

Creating magic requires the recognition of stages within stages, seeing micro-stages within macro-stages. The macro-stage is the physical place the audience encounters the magic. A magician may perform on a traditional proscenium stage, in a parlor, at a dinner table or on a street corner—whatever location the magician interacts with their audience becomes the macro-stage. The micro-stages emerge as the audience shifts their attention. David Copperfield regularly performs coin tricks in front of audiences in excess of 2,000. How? He manages the micro-stages, the focus of his audience. By focusing his own attention, with all his body, on a silver dollar, he can command the attention of 2,000 sets of eyes, whose minds enjoy the representation of a miracle as he makes the coin vanish. Copperfield directs the focus of his audience. Site retention won’t work unless the audience’s mind is engaged. The mind must not only see the cues that trigger the mental projections, but the mind must be so immersed in its focus that the mind accepts the magician’s cues as real. The creation of these cues, the intentional use of projection triggers, is the keystone to invoking illusion.

Misdirection is the magician’s ability to secretly do one thing by directing the audience’s attention on something else. Direction is the root of misdirection. Managing the micro-stages of an audiences focus is at the heart of misdirection—movement hides movement. How powerful is this technique? Harry Blackstone used to have an elephant walked on stage, up-stage-left, while he commanded attention down-stage-right. When Blackstone gestured up-stage-left, the audience was amazed to suddenly see an elephant. Rumor has it that this started as a bar bet where Harry wagered that he was so good at misdirection that he could walk an elephant on stage without any cover and the audience wouldn’t even see it.

Meme wranglers are magicians, playwrights, screenwriters and novelists among other artists who created dynamic performances for the theatre-of-the-mind. The Internet has borne a new species of marketing theatre, the weavers of magic who thread cyberspace into their tapestry are architects of a whole new set of possibilities and alternate realities.

Market RESEARCH has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities. Their righteous perceptions forbade them from considering what they didn’t already know to be true.

Righteousness induces prides which facilitates denial. The more righteous a person, the more they will unreasonable defend their perspective. Saying propaganda is inherently wrong is a damned perspective, a perspective that things are inherently good or evil. This perspective reinforces the nature of propaganda. Propaganda was created as a cost-effective tool to spread righteousness.

Propaganda is a weapon in the war for reality.

Propaganda is a tool. Holding propaganda as inherently evil is like saying that TNT is evil. They are both strong forces. They can be used constructive or destructively. The good/evil perspective is more static than how I see the universe. And, I'm also not sure that dangerous things are always bad. I'm glad propaganda was employed to defeat Hitler. Marketing has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities.

How many countries pride themselves on being totalitarian? Nazi Germany press clippings look similar to American "free" press articles on America’s War Against Terror.

“If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher (1889 - 1951)

join me at Corporate Marketing Secrets

Michel,
I trust you'll email me if I step on your toes. This is your stage and I respect both you and your stage.
Warmly, Ben.

Readers,
I am truly grateful for the knowledge I have gained from this board and the healthy respect for fluid intelligence I find here. If survival is the ultimate ideology, then what human template provides the greatest value to the greatest number?
Here's to drinkable water!
Ben