The CI:Marketing interface

The potential for CI to inform and influence marketing decisions is increasing and this combination can deliver an enviable competitive advantage. Simply knowing more about competitors is not enough. It is what the firm does with that information and how it weaves it into its decision making process which makes the difference. In a large number of organisations, private or public, it is the Marketing Department which carries the responsibility for critical activities such as customer management, product/service offering, pricing, promotion, distribution strategies, product portfolio management, competitor profiling and the identification of critical success factors to name a few. Marketing managers particularly, are charged with trying to answer the question “what do we have to do to achieve sustainable competitive advantage?”. This paper reviews the contribution from a number of authors who have embraced CI, MR, KM, BI with the added spice of psychology and biology. What is clear though, is that whatever the activity of gathering, assessing, analysing and acting upon any intelligence gathering process is called, it has to be advantageous and add to a firm’s intellectual capital. To suggest otherwise has little basis in the world of common sense.