New Tools for Customer Intelligence
One thing that all businesses of any industry or size have in common is that they wouldn’t exist without customers. So it would make sense that businesses would want to know as much as possible about their customers: what they want, how much they want to spend and how they make decisions on products. Fortunately, with social media, crowdsourcing and other innovations, it’s easier, more efficient and more affordable to gather consumer intelligence. Here are some examples:
The Fourth “P”
From the four “P’s” that make up the practice of marketing (price, product, placement and promotion), one of the most challenging may well be pricing. Pricing is critical to moving product but it is as much as an art as it is a science. Gathering customer research involves expensive, time consuming surveys and hitting the pricing “sweet spot” can be a challenge.
A new service out of Australia may not glean pricing insight directly from a target market but they have created a unique service and low-cost way for startups and small to medium sized businesses to get custom pricing advice. Pricing Prophets uses an online panel of marketing experts to compile a custom market report focused on pricing strategy recommendations.
Forecasting the Future
An economic slump is difficult for businesses to weather, no matter how much warning they may have. But a new economic forecasting tool might help businesses gauge important information such as customers’ willingness to spend which may aid in decisions like contracts, plans for expansion and inventory management.
The tool, which is still in beta form, was developed by online community economywatch.com. Called a real-time consumer confidence index, it compiles the perceptions of citizens around the world, indexes that data and puts it into a rolling 30 day dataset, to give a view of current perceptions vs. those a month ago, and vs. the average for the year. Participants must answer the questions about employment, business and economic conditions to view the results.
Reader Comments
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Posted by Dick Braly on November 4, 2012
I like this article. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I just find a company "Informatics Outsourcing" is a Outsourced Market Research-Customer Intelligence Company. They are Providing the service Worldwide.
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Posted by kalpanaceo on August 3, 2011
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