Career Space E-zine

Last night I attended a meeting of the HTCE (High Tech Communicators Exchange) with a presentation by Tim Bramwell called “Changing the Mindset: What You Need to Know About Marketing Intelligence To Give You a Competitive Edge.” From the HTCE website:

“About the Speaker: Tim Bramwell is a professional business and market intelligence consultant with a significant record of achievement gained from a 20+ year successful sales, operations and senior management expertise gained over a career spanning Microsoft Corp., Ericsson Canada, AT&T Canada and building his own companies. Tim has been a member of, and has led, sales and marketing delivery teams promoting a variety of technology, consumer and business-to-business products and services.”

I’ve been asking myself the questions lately: how does an organization create innovation and maintain it? How does it lead the way? The key is to go beyond marketing research, which is at times too narrow in scope and is time sensitive to that of marketing intelligence which can predict the behavioural triggers in the marketplace.

Some of the “nuggets” I took away from the talk:

• 30-80% of the an organizations inner workings and communications exist in the heads of the employees.
• email was never intended to be used for complex communications - it was never structured that way and stays contained within the email account.
• Marketing research and focus groups are not broad enough, they are time sensitive and aren’t necessarily adequate predictors of behavioural triggers in the marketplace.
• Marketing Intelligence is a set of tools used to create actionable items.
• Good places to gather intel is at trade shows as well as with vendors and suppliers of your competitors.
• Your own company’s salespeople and customer support are a good source of marketing intelligence.
• There are technology platforms that can gather and scrape data from websites using filters for specific information. Some of the information can be gathered from websites, weblogs and podcasts.
• The big question is “what do you do with the data once you have gathered it?”