Abstract

The article comments market intelligence for modern merchants. Almost every marketing management book makes opening obeisances to the marketing concept. Almost every after dinner speech affirms that marketing's only constant is market change. Almost every executive seminar contains a case which illustrates the doleful consequences for any businessman who is not market oriented. Over the past decade, while manufacturers have been widely urged to embrace the marketing concept, retailers have been largely exempted from such exhortation. Behind this dichotomy has been the generally accepted view that in understanding, as in positioning, retailers already are especially close to the market. Emerging research now refutes that view. Thus retailers, like manufacturers, should be building formal market intelligence systems. Technologically, the cost will be low: the remedies are surprisingly simple, readily available and usually cheap. Ideologically, the cost will be higher: management must be resolved to rethink its most basic assumptions and prepared to reverse its most cherished conclusions.