How to Create Management Awareness (or show them the money)

Managing your insights in the same way you would manage your product portfolio is just good sense. The way you ask and what you gather information about can be central to how you end up running your business, so why not create a strategy for it?

Market oriented businesses are in my definition characterised by having the presence of relevant market information (content) and knowledge sharing to disseminate and learn from this (process) with the purpose of promoting long term profitable action (direction) (Sorensen, 2009).

Having processes to spread information, the right content and a direction is having an insights strategy. Companies that have this have been shown to perform better, have better new product success and have higher comparative market share (Shapiro, 1988; Slater & Narver, 1995; Slater & Narver, 1998; Gouillart & Sturdivant, 1994; Anderson et al, 2006; Anderson & Narus, 1998; Pelham & Wilson, 1996; Singh, 2004) . So talking about the role of market information in your organisation is strategic and it is central.

But with researchers saying this from 1988 and forward, why has it not happened in more businesses. Perhaps it is because information gathering has lingered in marketing departments or specialised units, where employees sometimes even have an interest in keeping the information to themselves or are so isolated from the rest of the business that they have no idea what the rest of the business needs.