Using Market Intelligence for Business Success

Who We Are

     We help clients understand and align with their markets and customers so they can cost-effectively focus energies and resources on strategic, successful growth.  Recognizing changing needs and opportunities and integrating "the voice of the customer" are cornerstones of any planning process.
     While we have worked with many companies and organizations in high tech and healthcare, we always return to the information industry.  This includes working in and with publishers, vendors, libraries, researchers, and consumers/users. It is our home base. 
     We plan for immediate results and a future that is visionary, pragmatic, actionable, and measurable.

In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.
— Miyamoto Musashi

Our Approach

Listening is hearing the needs of the customer, understanding those needs and making sure the company recognizes the opportunity they present. 
– Frank Eliason

Without data you're just another person with an opinion. 
– W. Edwards Deming

Our market intelligence services involve summary recommendations with detailed support materials to enable clear strategic planning amongst all stakeholders and teams:

• There are facts: market size, structure, segments, and market forces creating pressures and vacuums.
• There are trends affecting the way people think about the overall landscape and competitive factors, both direct and indirect.
• There is understanding what customers are trying to accomplish and how they prioritize what is most useful to help them accomplish it.   
• And especially during times of change, there are additional issues and perceptions / misperceptions that affect what customers value and need.

All this market intelligence is gathered, analyzed, synthesized and adapted to your specific needs and goals.

What You Can Expect

• We will listen to you.
  
• We will develop a customized plan to meet your needs and exceed expectations.  Deliverables can take many forms depending on what your goals are and on the nature of the project. 
  
• We will hold regular briefings and updates with your team, adjusting our work based on feedback from you.
• We will make recommendations, but you won’t have to take our word for it, because we always include detailed documentation for you to form your own conclusions.    
• We expect that you will want / need to share results with other stakeholders and team members.  This is baked into the initial planning and reporting.

Telling a story remains one of the biggest challenges facing market research today.  – David Smith

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is to fund research and learn the basic facts.
– Bill Gates

Maureen Adamson, Principal

     Maureen Adamson is an information industry consultant offering business planning grounded in market research and market insights, optimizing knowledge of appropriate enabling technologies to deliver on business and organizational goals. 
     Her background includes a wide range of positions and responsibilities in digital information services, including past positions as Vice President of New Business Development at Reed Reference Publishing, a Reed Elsevier company, where she grew the rights licensing program into a multi-million dollar business and worked with other key executives to transition the company to workflow-integrated products and services and managing several key strategic partnerships, including PubNet and international ISBN Agency relations.  Earlier in her career, her business planning skills led to a position as President of Home Medical Monitoring and consulting in healthcare information systems.  Prior to that, she was a business outreach librarian on the Faculty of the College of Engineering at the University of Florida. She has an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With other AAP members, she was also involved in the early stages of developing the DOI, a unique identifier for digital objects. 
     Clients have included StayWell, Thompson Learning (Cengage), ABC-CLIO, NISO, a grant-funded project on Conservation Space, Against the Grain, Wolters Kluwer Health and American Chemical Society.
     She values and enjoys exploring market insights and bringing the knowledge of the behaviors, needs, and voice of the customer into business and program planning and loves a well-run project. She is intrigued by practical applications of new enabling technologies and the potential advantages and disadvantages of new business models. This includes using marketing and technical knowledge to ensure strategic goals are clear and pre-eminent in all stages of development.

Check out our blog, Bellwether Spotlight, for more on trends, interviews of thought leaders, and initiatives that capture our interest.