From Product-Market Data to Business Intelligence: Marketing Pioneers Who Engaged Their Clients

This paper is a historical review of how business information was transformed to business intelligence during the past half century when a bright group of pioneers established the foundations for organizing market/product information. The discussion moves beyond description and into an analytical mode, probing how and why their approaches succeeded. Included are: (1) a conceptual framework for business decision-making that enabled market information and product data specialists to offer user-friendly products; (2) the key role that coding played in reducing quantity and upgrading quality of data; (3) the wide variety of abstracts, indexes, and digests that were developed for customers; (4) brief portraits of a few pioneers in the field and how they succeeded in catering to diverse needs of clients by their product offerings; and (5) the specific path that organizations used to collaborate to “grow the field” even while they remained as keen rivals. In illuminating the early work of marketing information pioneers, we show how they enriched the field by building the data foundation on which organizations rely even now. We demonstrate that aggressive marketing strategies can be coupled with engaging clients and what the “take-away lessons” are for data mining today.