Building Strategy With Market Intelligence

I recently sat down for a conversation on How Leaders Build Strategy on Market Intelligence to talk about what market intelligence actually is, why so many high-impact initiatives stall before execution even starts, and how leaders can plan with evidence instead of assumptions.

Big take away: most high-impact initiatives don't fail in execution. They fail before execution ever starts. That's something I've seen play out again and again over 25 years and more than a thousand projects. Organizations don't usually fail because they lack data - they fail because they aren't clear on what market intelligence actually is, who owns it, and why it matters more than most leadership teams realize.

Market Intelligence Isn't Business Intelligence or Market Research

When clients come to us, they're usually sitting on a major decision or a go-to-market plan and feel like they don't have enough information to make it well. Most organizations already lean on two familiar tools. Business intelligence looks inward at what's happening inside the organization. Market research means going out and collecting data. 

Market intelligence is the missing third piece. It covers everything happening outside the organization: the economy, politics, social shifts, the environment, and how all of it will eventually land on your business. The distinction matters because internal data is backward-looking. It tells you what already happened. Market intelligence is meant to help you plan for what's coming, which is the whole point of a strategic plan in the first place.

Why Plans Fall Apart Before They Start

I see two failure patterns come up again and again.

No one truly owns the plan. Leadership teams gather, agree on an outcome, and then walk away assuming execution will simply happen. The problem is that when everyone owns the plan, technically no one does. I always layer a RACI matrix onto the strategies I build with clients: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. That "R" is the most important letter. Someone has to be named as responsible for getting the ball across the line.

Quiet internal resistance. When people don't believe a plan will work, they don't always say so out loud. They just do a half-hearted job on their part of it. That passive resistance is almost a kind of unintentional sabotage, and it's often invisible until the plan has already stalled.

The Real Cost of Planning on Assumptions

Assigning people and budget to an initiative is a cost even before results show up. Every hour spent on a poorly considered plan is an hour not spent on something that could have generated or saved money. I often compare what a lot of organizations do to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That's a waste of resources if there's no real thought behind the plan. Every plan needs to be built on a foundation of truth. If that foundation is really just assumptions the organization has convinced itself are true, it's a weak foundation to build on.

I saw this firsthand with a Canadian rebar company. They'd been reporting their market share based only on domestic production, without accounting for imports, which turned out to represent about 30% of the rebar used in Canada, mostly on the West Coast. The real numbers reshaped how leadership understood their own competitive position, and they weren't easy to hear, because it meant years of numbers reported up the chain weren't accurate. That's often the real barrier to using evidence well. Facts can contradict beliefs an organization has held for years. It takes real strength as a leader to accept an uncomfortable truth and move forward, and it's far easier to do that as a team than to put it on one person's shoulders.

Where I Actually Look for Signals

There's no single source of truth, but a few approaches consistently will give you a great start.

Look at organizations like yours. This means direct competitors, or peers in other jurisdictions solving the same problem. I've done this for electricity utilities looking at how other regions solved a problem, and for automotive associations comparing notes across 60-plus peer organizations on which side-hustle revenue streams, like travel insurance, roadside assistance, or used cars, actually worked.

Run a PESTLE scan. Political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental. This helps catch what's changed or is about to change across important areas, before it happens and impacts your plans.

Borrow from parallel industries. A solution that worked in one sector may translate somewhere unexpected. The discipline is in testing whether the underlying conditions are actually similar, not just copying the idea.

Talk directly to customers, not just frontline staff. A genuinely independent conversation with the people who buy directly from you often surfaces things you may not hear from your sales team. In-depth interviews, around 30 to 45 minutes with five to seven open-ended questions, and a comfort of sitting in silence, tend to produce far more honest insights than a quick survey. If you’re worried about participation, you could offer $150 to $200 as a thank-you for someone's time.

Finding Room to Innovate: Why Blue Ocean Thinking Still Matters

In 30 years, I have yet to see a truly new idea. Most people fall in love with their idea and believe nobody's ever thought of anything like it. But usually someone's already tried some version of it, and the innovation is really a refinement. And that’s fine. The mistake though is assuming there's nothing to learn from what's already been tried.

That said, there are still niche markets, even in 2026, that nobody is servicing well. I often point clients to the Blue Ocean Strategy idea: instead of competing in an already crowded, cutthroat space, find the niche nobody's addressing. Maybe a solution that's working in petrochemicals or software hasn't been brought into education or construction yet. In those cases, you're not really modeling the innovation itself. You're modeling the market. Is there evidence the same conditions that made it work elsewhere, like the pain point or the ability to pay, exist in this new market too? If they do, that's real evidence the idea could travel. If not, that's useful information before you spend the money finding out the hard way.

From Intelligence to Outcomes

Good market intelligence doesn't just describe the world. It should be modeled against the goal. 

If leadership wants to double sales but the external data shows we already hold 40 to 50% market share in that segment, "doubling" probably means chasing an unrealistic 100% share rather than making a smarter move into an adjacent market. That's the kind of thing I'll push back on before a plan gets built on a target that isn't achievable.

One of the projects I'm proudest of was with a nuclear energy company in Eastern Canada. They were considering a $100 million upgrade to one of their reactors to produce radioisotopes for a new class of cancer drugs, a market they knew nothing about. Over six or seven months, we mapped the entire radiopharmaceutical ecosystem. We talked to pharmaceutical companies and feedstock producers, and we were able to give them a definitive answer on demand before they committed. They made the upgrade, and it's now producing materials going into life-saving treatments. They didn't want to spend $100 million without knowing how it would play out, and everything we told them came true, because it was built on what other organizations had actually done, not a guess.

The Bigger Cultural Shift

If I have one last piece of advice, it's this: look at what organizations in Europe and Asia are doing differently. They're looking at 5-to-10-year horizons, not a couple of quarters ahead. In North America, our grow-fast, iterate-fast, fail-fast business culture means we waste a lot of resources and cycles throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Slowing down to gather real intelligence before committing resources costs a little time up front, but it's an ounce of prevention against a pound of cure. 

I'm Aaron Cruikshank, president of CTRS Market Intelligence in Vancouver, where my team and I have completed more than 1,000 projects over 25 years. I also teach market intelligence at the graduate level. If you'd like to have me speak to your organization or team, you can find more here.

About the author: Aaron Cruikshank is President of CTRS Market Intelligence. Since 2003, he and CTRS have supported more than 1,000 projects for growing SMEs, major brands and public-sector organizations, from market assessments to decision support. His background includes an Associate Vice President role at Ipsos. Aaron also speaks on market intelligence at conferences, on podcasts and in company workshops. More about Aaron · aaroncruikshank.com