Market Intelligence Dissemination Practices

Abstract

Market intelligence is a cornerstone of the marketing concept and essential to market-focused strategic planning and implementation. Although the importance of market intelligence is widely accepted, how managers can ensure the organization-wide generation, dissemination, and responsiveness to market intelligence remains a persistent challenge. In this article, the authors investigate market intelligence dissemination practices and their resulting managerial responses. Using qualitative methods, the authors identify five market intelligence dissemination practices that either update and reinforce organization members’ existing schemas (mental models) of the market or create new, shared schemas of the market. Specifically, they find that the creation, existence, or absence of organizationally shared market schemas is crucial in explaining the effectiveness of different market intelligence dissemination practices. Thus, in addition to being experts on market intelligence, intelligence directors must be authorities on organizational learning and ways to create shared meaning structures that enable disseminated intelligence to be understood and used within their organizations. The authors conclude with suggestions for practitioners on how to manage intelligence dissemination across their organizations more effectively and efficiently.

Enhancing financial performance by pharmacy innovation

“…Furthermore, these findings reinforce the view that closer ties to key stakeholders, such as customers, can lead to superior performance (Varadarajan, 2018). This study also builds on the findings that culture and the effective use of market intelligence are essential to innovation and performance (Gebhardt, Carpenter, & Sherry, 2006;Gebhardt, Farrelly, & Conduit, 2019;Maltz & Kohli, 1996). The indirect effect of customer orientation on financial performance via organizational innovation mirrored the works of Han et al (1998).…”

Resilience building in service firms during and post COVID-19

“…Regarding market intelligence dissemination, Lettice et al (2014) found that the law firms had a low capability to effectively disseminate market intelligence during the recession, which prevented them from having a return on their investment in market intelligence collection. The low capability of market dissemination is due to the lack of either interdepartmental communication or a shared understanding of the market among employees (Gebhardt et al, 2019;Lettice et al, 2014). To enhance interdepartmental communication, the development of a robust communication system through a considerate and participative leadership style and the adoption of proper information systems is essential (Strese et al, 2016).…”

“…To enhance interdepartmental communication, the development of a robust communication system through a considerate and participative leadership style and the adoption of proper information systems is essential (Strese et al, 2016). In order to develop a shared understanding of the market and increase market intelligence dissemination capability, service firms can use five practices: (1) distribution of market intelligence by providing reports and presentations to internal stakeholders and sharing a performance dashboard with them; (2) centralization of market intelligence within the organization and assigning its management to the intelligence team; (3) tailoring market intelligence for each user group in the organization based on their preexisting market conceptions; (4) familiarizing organization members with the world of customers and other stakeholders through empathic learning methods such as secondhand ethnographic stories; and (5) encouraging organization members to learn about customers' worlds through experiential learning methods such as direct interaction with customers (Gebhardt et al, 2019). Lettice et al (2014) found that market responsiveness had the highest score among all three stages of market orientation and exerted the most significant influence on law firms' subjective performance during the recession.…”

Commentary: A Strategic Perspective on Capturing Marketing Information to Fuel Growth: Challenges and Future Research

“…Without this, decision makers spend most of their time arguing about the "facts" and engaging in political maneuvering to "sell" their individual viewpoints rather than jointly exploring how best to use their shared understanding of the meaning and implications of data and analysis to generate and select among relevant decision options. Gebhardt, Farrelly, and Conduit (2019) detail just how difficult it is to adjust decision makers' marketplace mental schema. And yet questions remain.…”