Marketing plans for new product launch and existing products' defensive or offensive strategies must contain market intelligence to have a chance of achieving their goals. For most large consumer product companies, marketing plans are based on data provided by the advertizing agencies and the very large consulting firms' (VLCF). So how come the overwhelming majority of new products launches fail miserably?

The mistake of marketing managers, brand directors and other in similar positions is to confuse market intelligence with the typical number crunching of public statistics by the consultants and ad/media agencies. Anyone working in Pharmaceutical companies knows the extensive reliance on market statistics such as market share (by product, by prescription, by market, by household, by provider, by state, by sector, by planetary system, and so forth and so on) provided by IMS, a large data provider. In consumer goods, it is Nielsen's statistics that get abused. Prices, volume, by retail outlet, by hour of day purchased, by the color of the eye of the buyer, etc, etc. If it is numerical - consultants will sell it to you!

There are three problems with this over reliance on market statistics. First, they are available to all for a price. Right out of the gate, brand and product managers find themselves with no advantage of knowledge over competitors. Everyone gets the same numbers and mine them to death.

Second, the market statistics are not intelligence, even though the Ad agencies and the VLCF proudly declare that they provide "market intelligence". The confusion is prevalent among those who have little or no training in competitive intelligence. Market statistics are information. To turn those into market intelligence one needs to put them in perspective, perspective which can best be provided by the company internal competitive intelligence experts, not outside number crunchers with a neck for PowerPoint presentation.

Third, market statistics are only one, and often the least important information for drawing a market, product or brand plans. They reflect historical data instead of strategic choices and future intentions, and therefore shed no light on the competitive response one can expect in the market. Marketing managers devise elaborate and difficult plans with only intuitive guesses regarding how competitors will react to their initiatives. When push comes to shove, most plans we've seen assume, implicitly, that competitors will simply roll over and play dead. That is inevitably reinforced by the MBAs working for advertizing agencies, who believe their campaign is always superior to competitors'. Alas, only in their minds...