IJMR Editorial

Abstract

One of the opening sessions of Impact 2019, the main MRS annual conference, held this year on 12 and 13 March in London, was titled the ‘Intelligence CapitalTM Debate’, held to preview the launch on 21 March of a new MRS/Kantar report, “The responsive business: creating growth and value through intelligence capital” by Julie Kollman and Andrew Curry (https://www.mrs.org.uk/ resources/intelligence-capital), with Julie Kollman (Kantar) as the key speaker, followed by a panel discussion. The report provides a blueprint to help find growth in a world where GDP is flat, and economies are sluggish. The main contention is that the power of knowledge, if effectively harnessed, can transform the strategy of an organization by keeping in touch with, and responding too, the dynamic nature of today’s consumer. Therefore, knowledge should be treated as a key intangible asset sharing in capital investment to create the “responsive business.” The treatment of brands as intangible assets on the balance sheet was accepted decades ago, and classes of intangible assets can also include customer lists and databases, valued on the basis of historic, and potential future, revenue from sales (see the list, for example, in chapter 12, “Valuing Brands” in “Marketing Accountability,” McDonald and Mouncey, Kogan Page 2009), which takes us some way toward creating and applying knowledge in a marketing-related context. In that book, we also describe a practical framework that harnesses knowledge of the market and customers to aid the development of a consumer-focused marketing strategy and include a description of the Information Quality Management Maturity Grid, a method first developed in the 1990s by Philip Crosby, to help improve the quality of the information flowing through an organization. So how does this new report move this debate forward? The authors identify three key components to Intelligence CapitalTM Debate: Structural Intelligence, Activation Intelligence, and Human Intelligence. They argue that this intelligence needs to be harnessed to identify growth opportunities, new revenue streams, strengthening brand value, increasing speed to market, and to generate efficiencies. The sources of information from which knowledge can be extracted have grown exponentially in recent years. This together with the ability to integrate data from different sources to generate insight through marketing analytics is transforming the competitive capabilities of companies (see my Editor’s blog: https://www.mrs.org.uk/blog/ijmr/mrs-data-analytics-and-insight-conference). However, the new twist, in this era where finding the golden nuggets can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, is to address the question: “what value does investment in knowledge need to