Market Scans: The Usual Suspects
This week, Harvard Business Review talks about Scanning for Threats and Opportunities“‘All managers scan, but they often do so passively,” say the authors of Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that Will Make or Break Your Company.’”
In defense of those managers (having been one myself) – when you’re getting hit from all sides with daily work and firefighting, it’s difficult to fit in much else. So, in market scanning, it’s easy to get into the habit of reading the same industry pubs, talking to the same analysts, tracking the same competitors, etc. All the usual suspects.
However, to really be prepared (and spot new opportunities) it’s necessary, as the article points out, to ask questions such as, “What changes could make our product obsolete?” We also have to look at things outside our own industry. What’s going on in our society? Legislation (existing & pending)? The economy? Demographics? Weather patterns? (Got a critical supplier in a hurricane zone? ruh-roh.)
Things are almost always more complicated and/or not what they seem (just as in the movie, where the weakling little guy turned out to be the evil mastermind.) So, rounding up the usual suspects could leave you bamboozled and blindsided.
Update: Olivier Blanchard’s take on all this over at the Corante Marketing Hub. (For those of you new to blogging. This is a great example of the power and ease of it all. Olivier and I have never actually met. Yet, we work together via Corante and have conversations, all online for your participation as well!)
Tags: business development, market research, marketing, marketing troubleshooting, nobodies
View the Blog Roll
Good posting and always love “two fer” days: Olivier Blanchard’s posting sweetens the conversation.
I think that great business leaders often have a kind of pattern recognition that allows them to see more than they even know they see at times.
Novelist are like this: their stories are often about the pattern’s they see forming in society – for a good on this very subject I recommend William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition”. As a marketer you’ve got to love a story where the central charactor is allergic to branding logos!
I think we are all creatures of habit. It is how we function. That makes it very hard to “stay on the edge” . We tend to look at the same competitors all the time (if so).
But in today’s environment it is a much more complex task to follow trends and learn what your competitors are doing. In many cases managers don’t even know who they are – until after the fact.
Which manager has time to follow the entire blogosphere for all his Technorati tags, study regular search engines, go through the daily press and talk to other players in his market every day?
I think it is almost a new business someone could build: Professional competitor monitoring. I know there are services who screen competitors websites and so on. But I haven’t seen anything really sophisticated yet.
I don’t trust the big consulting firms so we’d need a new kid on the block.
Good points, Klaus. And, the reason the “market scan” idea is so close to my heart is I do such things for my clients. Since I’m not in the company and am on the outside looking in (and around, up and down), I look at all kinds of things that that might not seem – at least initially – to have any bearing on the company or its competitiveness. (The ol’ “butterfly flappin’ its wings in Brazil causing a hurricane here” type of thing.) It also helps to have an outsider give some perspective since they’re not emotionally involved (it’s not our career, paycheck, pension, product on the line).
That said, however, one of my pet peeves is folks paying an outside consultant to tell them everything about their own business. There aren’t any magic or quick answers. And, as so well illustrated in one my favorite books, “Get Back in the Box” innovation can (and should) come for knowledge and expertise. An outsider is never going to know your company, product or market as intimately as you do.