Market Intelligence Dissemination Practices

Market intelligence is a cornerstone of the marketing concept and essential to market-focused strategic planning and implementation. Although the importance of market intelligence is widely accepted, how managers can ensure the organization-wide generation, dissemination, and responsiveness to market intelligence remains a persistent challenge. In this article, the authors investigate market intelligence dissemination practices and their resulting managerial responses. Using qualitative methods, the authors identify five market intelligence dissemination practices that either update and reinforce organization members’ existing schemas (mental models) of the market or create new, shared schemas of the market. Specifically, they find that the creation, existence, or absence of organizationally shared market schemas is crucial in explaining the effectiveness of different market intelligence dissemination practices. Thus, in addition to being experts on market intelligence, intelligence directors must be authorities on organizational learning and ways to create shared meaning structures that enable disseminated intelligence to be understood and used within their organizations. The authors conclude with suggestions for practitioners on how to manage intelligence dissemination across their organizations more effectively and efficiently.