Brand intelligence is information and insights your company can gain. These areas of information will give you a strategic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your brand as it currently stands. This isn’t a line of enquiry only large multinational firms should pursue. This is due to how brand intelligence allows you to have up to date detailed information. In a world where information holds so much power in business, these sorts of insights are needed for every type of business.
Brand intelligence allows you to stop having to guess when making big business decisions. Guessing may seem a harsh term here. An informed decision might be more the case. If so, then the question has to be what information are you currently making decisions with? For many small businesses, the answer is usually sales figures. This approach works well for many. However, if you are in an ever-changing market, or simply a market that isn’t in a stable low growing sector, then information from sales can often be outdated. This is due to how, opinions about your brand could have influenced a purchaser’s decision a day, week or even month ago. The sale is the last step of a very complicated process. Using the sale alone as your information for business decisions, oversimplifies and is not current enough to be a viable source of information for large decisions.
Once you have made guessing obsolete, it is important to ask yourself why a brand is performing in a certain way. This might seem to be only the case when an area of your company is underperforming. However, when something is doing well, it is sometimes more important to know why this is the case. This is because this can signpost areas of profitable expansion. Rather than just taking the rise in revenue for granted, any business needs to find why it has occurred and build upon it if they are going to succeed.
Brand intelligence companies can help, especially if the time resources for your business to carry out the necessary information can’t be allocated. These specialist companies will also be able to offer more in-depth information, due to their established roots and specialisation. If your company is at a stage where it can increase (or maybe even allocate) funds to market research, these companies should be one of your first areas of interest.
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2018 ·