Market Intelligence Playbook

M-Brain’s Market Intelligence Playbook helps you with your analysis work. The analysis models included in the playbook are particularly useful for understanding the company’s internal operational environment and making optimal use of it.

The playbook offers insight into the following areas:  

• company value creation 
• critical success factors 
• strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities facing the company 
• main differentiating activities that customers appreciate 
• major industry-level trends affecting businesses 

For best results on how to utilize the models, gather a working group of 3 to 5 people, including a facilitator, take notes and reserve a minimum of 1,5 hours, depending on the exercise.  

Company Value Chain Analysis

Company Value Chain Analysis is an exercise that helps companies understand how value is created inside the company. Lessons to be learnt include: 

• Which are the most valuable company activities?  
• Are there activities that can be improved to gain competitive advantage? 
• Analysis of different organizational activities helps in finding opportunities for cost reduction 
• Constructing a value chain for the company and the customer enables identifying the best activities for differentiation 

Critical Success Factor Analysis

Critical Success Factor Analysis is an exercise that helps companies identify their most critical success factors and how well the companies perform, when measured by these factors. Lessons to be learnt include: 

• Which are the core factors (e.g. technology, employee skills, marketing) that are of major importance for achieving success? 
• How well does the company perform in these key competitive areas when compared to competitors? 

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a traditional tool that looks at the internal company environment for strengths and weaknesses, as well as the external environment for opportunities and threats. M-Brain adds probability factors to give further substance to the analysis. Lessons to be learnt include: 

• Identify your internal key strengths and weaknesses, benchmark these to competitors 
• Assess your performance in different strengths and weaknesses, then assess the importance of each strength or weakness 
• Identify major threats and opportunities in your external environment. How serious are the threats, how attractive the opportunities? What are the probabilities for each of them taking place? 

Core Context Analysis

Core Context Analysis aims to recognize those core company processes, activities and deliverables that are essential in the customers’ eyes. These differentiating activities are separate from those that the company needs to merely stay in business. Lessons to be learnt include: 

• Learn to recognize core differentiating activities from context activities 
• Learn to recognize whether or not a shortfall in core or context activity results in an immediate revenue threat (a mission critical activity) 
• Know when, for instance, there is an opportunity to turn a context activity into a differentiating activity that wins customers 

PESTEL Analysis

PESTEL Analysis identifies the most relevant political, economic, social, technological, economic and legal trends for your business and industry. Lessons to be learnt include: 

• by building a comprehensive trend map and identifying the most critical trends that may potentially affect your business, you will ensure that different aspects of political, economic and other trends are considered 
• identifying the most important trends acts as a great basis for building early warning and opportunity systems to monitor trends 

Download our whitepaper