Marketing intelligence represents a continuous process of understanding, analyzing, and assessing a firm’s internal and external environments associated with customers, competitors, and markets and then using the acquired information and knowledge to support the firm’s marketing-related decisions. Marketing intelligence provides a road map of current and future trends in customers’ preferences and needs, new market and segmentation opportunities, and major shifts in marketing and distribution in order to improve the firm’s marketing planning, implementation, and control.

Marketing intelligence has evolved from a creative process into a highly datadriven process. Data sources for marketing intelligence can come from internal and external. With the advances of information technology and widespread diffusion of database and data warehouse systems in firms, large volumes of internal data useful for marketing intelligence have been generated and maintained by firms. At the same time, the proliferation of WWW and Web 2.0 innovations (eg, product review websites, social networking communities) dramatically explode external data for marketing intelligence, as measured by sheer volume of data and number of data sources. On the other hand, the increases in competition and volatility of markets and customer preferences/needs require firms frequently updating their marketing intelligence or even retargeting their marketing intelligence directions.