Article on SMINT by Luis Madureira published on CI Magazine 217 Spring Issue by SCIP

1. Competitive Intelligence12
SMINT: Why CI Needs A Fresh Approach

2. 13www.scip.orgVolume 20 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
SMINT:
Why CI Needs A
Fresh Approach
Late 2007, I was hired by Heineken in
Portugal to set-up and run the CI function
reporting directly to the CEO. At the
time, we were several market share
percentage points behind our most direct
competitor. Two years and a half later, the
CI function was World Class by several
different assessment frameworks (WCCI
and M-Brain / GIA Roadmap), and
Heineken was market leader. That was
when I started thinking what could I do
to improve further. In 2012, I presented
SMINT - Social Market Intelligence - to
the SCIP community at the European
Summit, in Dublin. And during the last
5 years, I have been implementing this
approach in business both globally and
locally. This article provides a detailed
explanation of what it is and why you
should consider using it.
Back then, and even moreso today, we
live in a world marked by volatility,
uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,
or as it’s termed by the military, a
VUCA World. This is a world where
Black Swans occur at an increasingly
faster pace, and crisis management is
business-as-usual; where companies are
unable to predict what happens in their
home market, industry, or category, let
alone beyond borders; where causes
and effects interlace in a complex web
which makes it extremely difficult to
identify the root causes and the problems
management has to decide upon; where
the significance of events is impossible to
quantify and dimension.
VUCA factors are potentiated by a set
of drivers resulting from societal and
technology changes. Amongst these
interweaving factors are primarily
effects on the social consumer, such as
connectedness, mobile, omni-channel,
and real-time.
A basic definition of the social consumer
is essentially someone who consults those
theytrustbeforemakingabuyingdecision
through any of the channels available to
them, including the web, social networks,
and traditional media (TV, Radio,
Outdoors, Press). This includes relatives,
friends, or even complete strangers who
have experienced the product or service
and shared their views. Have you ever
consulted reviews made by other people
before booking a hotel? Have you ever
clicked on Amazon’s recommendation
“Customers Who Bought This Item Also
Bought”? These are daily examples of
social consumerism. The social consumer
now has a wealth of consumer-generated
information at their fingertips!
The super-connectedness of global
communications has challenged how
companies interact, engage, and
maintain relevance and trust with their
key audiences and public-at-large. The
reputation of a company must endure
the “tyranny of transparency”. It is no
longer possible to define and control
what a company stands for. Instead, this
is increasingly defined by the shared
opinions and experiences of socially-
connected consumers. These have
greater access to information and news,
by Luis Madureira

3. Competitive Intelligence14
heightened awareness of economic and geopolitical
matters, and the experiences of other individuals
communicated via online communities and social
networks, who are more discerning about the companies
they choose to do business with or support.
According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile marketing can be
defined as any marketing activity conducted through a
ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly
connected using a personal mobile device. The
increasing active mobile social users, as per a We Are
Social study, has gone up from 1.968 to 2.549 billion,
an estimated penetration of 34% of a total population
of 7.476 billion, reinforce the significance of this driver.
Furthermore, a study led by Nottingham Trent University
has discovered that the average person checks their
device 85 times a day, spending a total of five hours
browsing the web and using apps. Considering the
smartphone is never more than an arm’s length away
from their users, even when they are asleep, this means
that it’s common these days to see an angry consumer
venting their frustration in some social network of their
choice. This means, that on the other end of the line, a
brand crisis might emerge and need to be managed!
At its core, omni-channel is defined as a multichannel sales
approach that provides the customer with an integrated
shopping experience. Integrated being the key word in
the last sentence. The customer can be shopping online
from a desktop or mobile device, or by telephone, or
in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience should
be seamless. In fact, the omni-channel experience goes
beyond sales, and much into communication. Today,
the social consumer expects to make a complaint in a
Facebook post and receive a phone call by a brand
or product representative that has the power to make
it up for them. This example is a note to highlight that
it’s not enough to just have a multi-channel presence,
but an integrated operating system is of essence. An
omni-channel social customer relationship management
capability is critical these days, as well as the capability
to listen to the social consumer himself, all this without
invading his privacy!
The demand for “real-time everything” is evident in
the social consumer’s lack of patience in waiting for
whatever he needs or desires. Simon Sinek explains this
and the Millennial’s Paradox in an interview given to
Inside Quest perfectly (http://bit.ly/2l8kxVa). It is all
about instant real-time gratification. The sense of “you
can get it just because you want it”, puts a huge pressure
on companies and brands.
If we analyze the result of all that is laid out above,
we got a twofold insight. On one side, business leaders
are left lost, confused, unsure, perplexed, disoriented,
or bewildered…you can choose the one that fits reality
best. This lack of comprehension or awareness results
from the fact that the speed of business is increasingly
fast, and most business leaders are now from the
previous generation and have not kept up to date
with technology’s advances. Even worse, they are not
tuned to the new generation’s mindset. In fact, in some
ways, neither is marketing as a discipline. With all of
SMINT: Why CI Needs A Fresh Approach

4. 15www.scip.orgVolume 20 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
the technology and societal changes that technology
provides we currently have a data deluge to analyze.
Data itself will grow exponentially with the advent of
the internet of things, where machines interconnected
will produce data around the clock, compared to
humans who did this during waking hours. This “disruptive
technology” brings an opportunity to CI which is the need
for deriving actionable insights to guide organizations
and brands through this new fast changing competitive
environment.
In a nutshell, Competitive Intelligence needs to have an
answer to the Social Business paradigm. This can be
described as the need to understand how a business
can evolve by effectively embracing the fundamental
principles of a business era in which social technologies
and sociological changes affect the ways in which
organizational and customer success is achieved.
The answer I devised is SMINT. The S(ocial) M(arket)
INT(elligence) acronym deliberately avoids the confusion
with social intelligence, a discipline in the realm of social
sciences, while at the same time differentiates from CI-
as-usual to highlight the answer to the Social Business
paradigm. As a proposed definition, SMINT makes sense
of the increasingly fast-changing business ecosystem
by developing actionable insights on the external
environment, market, industry, players, and consumers
to understand, compete, and win in near real-time,
though providing the basis for establishing a sustainable
competitive advantage.
SMINT relies on Design Thinking as a mindset, though
using an integrative approach as well as abductive
thinking. Abductive thinking differs from the linear
reasoning of deduction and induction, and is much closer
to a mental map, in that abductive thinking works with
a series of iterations to come out with the best solution
for several parts of the problem at hand. On the other
side, it runs on improved traditional CI methodologies
and frameworks, obviously adapted to cope with the
challenges highlighted above. In practice, SMINT is
the ultimate Early Warning Opportunity System, as it
collects, processes, and disseminates a flux of actionable
insights in almost real-time.
The connected social consumer leaves a digital footprint
that SMINT picks up using specific social web listening
tools, providing public information on trends, tastes,
opinions, recommendations, and complaints to inform on
such topics as business strategy to marketing tactics and
communication messages.
The increasing mobility of this consumer guarantees
that most times his reactions are not filtered as they are
vented on the exact moment the consumer experiences
a good or bad experience. This provides some exciting
gold nuggets to inform marketing and innovation,
sometimes even new business models.
Since these reactions can also be shared in different
channels, SMINT integrates both the traditional channels
as well as online channels, so it can generate real social
business insights, therefore informing the social business,
commerce, and customer experience strategy.
Most importantly, SMINT is collecting data in real-time
on key intelligence topics. This allows for businesses to
interact with the competitive environment in the shortest
amount of time possible, through exploring opportunities
and mitigating the threats. Since the organizations using
SMINT will listen to their own performance in real time this
allows for a virtuous iterative cycle of self-improvement
on their own strategy and tactics.
Since digital transformation can be seen as the path to
social business, SMINT can also be seen as the operating
system to support the transformation itself. In this realm,
this approach can support the business transformation in
several areas, from culture to strategic processes, and
most importantly to support decision execution and fine-
tuning in real-time.
Most significantly, SMINT brings the consumer and
customer to CI, as of today we can listen to the consumer
and customer in real-time using a myriad of social
listening tools, from keyword search to geolocation
based informatics. This can also confirm or prove wrong
the hypothesis of one-off ad hoc Consumer Research
studies. Most importantly, you have on-going and real-
time examples which can give marketers the opportunity
to understand live the consumer reaction to marketing
and branding initiatives.
This integrated virtuous loop is an important competitive
advantage over competitors!
SMINT: Why CI Needs A Fresh Approach

5. Competitive Intelligence16
SMINT: Why CI Needs A Fresh Approach
I had the chance to work with a customer over the span of
a few years, first without SMINT and later with SMINT in
full power mode. This means we were integrating all the
types of sources that you can imagine, from traditional
media (TV, Radio, Outdoors, Press, etc.) to digital news.
From traditional advertising to online advertising, all
types of advertising investments were included, even
direct marketing, monitoring, and listening to social
media channels from competitors all around the world.
The difference was astonishing!
On one side, being able to help steer the business
with real-time actionable insights and its implications
is priceless. One of the first projects for this client
was a deep dive on a specific competitor. This led
us to the critical insight that our customer’s marketing
communication was working against it. Basically, they
were communicating a competitor’s strength, and
not their own! This led us to developing a new global
communication platform. When we were in the final
phase, almost ready to launch, a different competitor
launched a marketing campaign in a strategic market
that was identical to the one we were developing for our
customer. We had to make a deep dive on this subject
and foresee if this would be the new global positioning
of this different competitor. Can you imagine if that was
true and we were not monitoring? Can you imagine the
cost of developing a global marketing communications
platform? And can you imagine the cost of launching
a new campaign that is identical to one of your key
competitors later than his?
On the other side, being able to make a deep dive
on any subject, at any time, since you have the key
intelligence topics and questions support data on
record, is of an incredible added value. For the
Competitive Intelligence function and professionals, but
also for the customer who at any given time can inform
his decision making with factual evidence. The working
document of the deep dive that would inform the annual
planning was a collection of 1000 slides which were
used to inform business, business unit, go-to-market,
marketing and communications, digital, advertising
and even messaging strategy and tactics. Because of
the integrated and all organization level approach, we
could analyze social media using hypotheses that we
would never be able to even identify with the best big
data processing and tools. Such hypotheses, led us to
identify with no margin of error the strategy used by the
competitor for their campaigns on social networks. This
allowed for a guerrilla approach that ultimately would
convert prospects for our customer before its competitor.
In a nutshell, SMINT can integrate all sources to analyze
all the elements of the competitive environment, and all
organization levels and functions, to derive actionable
insights and implications to your company in real-time,
constituting a strategic flux that allows for informed
decision making in anticipation of your competitors, thus
providing a sustained competitive advantage.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Luis Madureira is a Graduated
from NOVA SBE in Economics with
a specialization in Marketing, and
accredited with a CIP-II (Master of
Competitive Intelligence) by ACI –
Academy of Competitive Intelligence.
Vast experience in FMCG and Consulting, in companies
like Diageo, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Red Bull, United Coffee,
Heineken, Ogilvy and ÜBERBRANDS. Held leadership
roles in Marketing, Sales, Strategy and Intelligence at
Local and Global levels.
Chairs the SCIP Portugal Chapter and he is an Associate
Scholar in circa 10 University Post Graduations and
Masters internationally. Author of Social Market
Intelligence – SMINT.
Set-up the CI Centre of Excellence for OglivyRED, the
strategic consultancy arm of Ogilvy & Mather, as Global
Competitive Intelligence Practice Lead. Currently he
leads the Brand Building (R)evolution as Partner of
ÜBERBRANDS, helping companies, boards and leaders
navigate their competitive environment by informing
their decision making with actionable insights, support
the design of winning strategies, and the development of
innovative products, services and business models.