Develop a Market Intelligence System

Do you have products sitting in your business waiting for customers to come in to purchase, or do you have customers that come to you wanting to buy your products and services? In today's price competitive environment, the successful business will be customer driven rather than product driven. They develop their product line and service menu first by testing them in the marketplace and then developing and broadening only as their information or intelligence system applies.
A Market Intelligence System employs various methods of collecting valuable data or information that enables you to forecast the direction of your market. The key is to be sure you are gathering quality information. Truly, the quality of information that you gather will dictate the quality and success of your decisions over time.
Businesses do not fail because they don't have good ideas; they fail because they make poor decisions based on a lack of information. A Market Intelligence System that is tailored to the size of your business helps you fulfill customers' needs because it identifies their profiles, purchasing habits and motives and their wants and needs.

A method is described for real-time market intelligence and competitive analysis. News stories are collected online for a designated group of companies. The goal is to detect critical differences in the text written about a company versus the text for its competitors. A solution is found by mapping the task into a non-stationary text categorization model.

The overall design consists of the following components: (a) a real-time crawler that monitors newswires for stories about the competitors (b) a conditional document retriever that selects only those documents that meet the indicated conditions (c) text analysis techniques that convert the documents to a numerical format (d) rule induction methods for finding patterns in data (e) presentation techniques for displaying results. The method is extended to combine text with numerical measures, such as those based on stock prices and market capitalizations that allow for more objective evaluations and projections.