i7 Marketing Blog

Business intelligence can be the difference between being an average-performing company and a superior-performing organization. Your company can gain a competitive advantage by using business intelligence to align your strategic objectives with line-of-business initiatives, according to a report by UBM Tech in 2008. These initiatives begin with customer and competitor intelligence.

Pricing of your product or service is one of the most vital decisions you can make in your business. Yet, if your company is like many, you may decide on the price based on judgment without objectively assessing how customers value the different components of your offering. As a result, you may undervalue the products and services you sell and not capture the inherent profits you can earn.

Globalization remains the world’s ray of light amid today’s economic environment of high fiscal deficits, high debt and high unemployment. As the world economy slowly emerges from one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, your company can sustain its growth by globalizing your products.

Michael Porter of Harvard Business School revolutionized how business leaders think about competitive strategy with his publications starting in the 1980s. This included the classic books, 

Business intelligence, sometimes called market intelligence, is information that your company can use to develop new customers, increase sales and sustain a competitive advantage. This information provides your company with a view of the market. It helps you understand what is happening in the market, what customers and competitors are doing, and the likely potential for new products or services.

It’s sometimes confusing to distinguish between a product and a brand. It’s not always so cut and dry. That’s because popular products can become brands and you can use brand names to refer to products. For example is the name Xerox the product or the brand?

There are two ways to build a company. One way is to build your company from your products. The other way is to create and sustain customers.

Many executives believe that expanding products and product lines can generate more sales. At least that’s what companies often do when they are stuck in a sales slump or are trying to meet financial expectations by investors on Wall Street. In some cases, sales actually increase in the short run. But in the long run, profits most likely go down.

If you’ve been in business for a long time then you probably have more than a fair share of stories you can tell about interactions with customers, both the good and the bad.