It’s never been more important to get your marketing strategy right than it is at this time of economic upheaval. Creating Market Insight is central to ensuring that you are targeting the right markets and customers, yet for many organisations such insight remains elusive.
Smith and Raspin’s extensive research shows that a strong strategy is vital for business success. An approach that addresses questions of which customers and markets to target with tailored products and services should form the cornerstone of that successful marketing strategy.
Yet understanding complex and constantly changing markets and customers is challenging. Although many organisations recognise the importance of gaining market insight, the authors show that senior management devotes remarkably little time to it because of the distractions of office politics and fire fighting.
One of the principal aims of the book is to “disabuse readers of the dangerous idea that understanding a market is easy and yields to the application of processing power with relatively little reflection”. Throwing money at IT systems and number crunching rarely delivers.
The authors demonstrate how firms all too frequently adopt an ad hoc approach to scanning the environment – with ad hoc results. But as they point out, “an organisation that develops superior scanning capabilities is better positioned to take advantage of opportunities in complex and turbulent markets”.
To gain a proper understanding of your organisation’s environment, the authors argue that as well as a systematic approach, a good mix of behavioural types is needed among those responsible for gaining insight. They define four types of managerial scanning behaviour – Analysts, Categorists, Monitors and Viewers – which they explore in depth.
The authors set out eight steps to developing an effective scanning capability for gathering information. Translating information into insight is at the crux of this method, but they are at pains to point out that not all insight requires action. The understanding gained need to be relevant and aligned to the business, so the final chapter is devoted to looking at how marketers can turn insight into value for their organisations, and how to tackle the tricky job of implementation.
The result of extensive research, the book is comprehensive and full of carefully selected case studies across a broad range of industries and organisational sizes. The use of break-out boxes and chapter summaries make it as easy to read as possible for the time-pressed manager.
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