A marketing consultancy is a place where you get professional intelligent advice.
I don’t mean that we have acquired superior knowledge and skills in marketing over other business people. I mean in the Webster’s dictionary definition of intelligence: marketing consultants have ‘the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.’
A marketing consultancy is hired to collect, analyse, and package information. We transform data into meaningful and useful information for strategic or tactical business purposes.
Marketing Consultancy – Business Intelligence
With ‘business intelligence’ marketing consultants are able to use data to help identify and create new strategic business opportunities. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy can provide a sustainable competitive market advantage and long-term stability.
‘Business intelligence’ was a term originally used by Richard Miller Devens in 1865 to describe how the banker Sir Henry Furnese, gained profit by receiving and acting upon information about his environment, prior to his competitors. The ability to collect and react accordingly based on the information retrieved, an ability that Furnese excelled in, is today still at the very heart of business intelligence.
Business intelligence is a discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to business owners in support of their decisions. Areas of investigation that include the market environment, the competition and the target audiences.
Marketing Consultancy – Market Intelligence
‘Market intelligence’ is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analysed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making: Decision-making in areas such as market evaluation, product development, pricing policy, distribution channels and promotional planning.
Intelligence ultimately provides us with evidence that supports our proposals.
Businesses that fail to reach their potential, or just fail, often do so because intuition out grew intelligence. The ego or vanity of the human decision-making got in the way of the process of facts, logic and discipline.
Objective and valuable intelligence is the reason ‘consultants’ are used by the biggest and best global companies. It is why even medium sized business should seek outside assistance.
Lawyers, Architects and Accountants are used by business because they provide expert advice and implementation based on their grasp of specific intelligence. Yet although these professionals add cost few add value to a brand.
It strikes me that businesses that do not employ outside expert advice from people with the kind of specific intelligence marketing consultants provide are missing out on building sustainable competitive advantage.
A marketing consultancy adds value.