5 Tips On Making Market Research & Intelligence Work For You

• Ensure clear scoping of objectives at the outset of the project.  Studies that are too broad in scope rarely obtain the detail necessary for full understanding.
• Recognize the value of different types of research and intelligence.  It is worth talking through your overall business objectives with potential suppliers, and allowing them to suggest the type of research that will best meet these objectives.
• Do the results pass the common sense test?  If you have used a good quality supplier, they almost certainly will!
• What to do is based on fundamentals; how to do it is based on the detail.  For example, whether to enter a market depends largely on the high level findings of market size and growth, and barriers and incentives to entry.  How to enter the market will be based upon many fine details, ranging from distributor profiles and transport channels through to promotional messages and human resource availability.  A good quality market intelligence provider will provide both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
• Choose a provider that has been there before.  Your provider should have experience of closely-related industries, but also of the target countries of interest.  Sensitivity to different data collection and interpretation requirements in the countries of interest to you can have a strong impact on the validity and usefulness of a project.