Aiming With Eyes Wide Open: OSINT for Market Insights

Breaking down the cost of ignorance

It’s next to impossible to hit a target with your eyes closed. You can certainly try, but the results won’t be pretty. Like hitting a pinata.

Why is it acceptable then in business to go to market without knowing as much about that market as possible? And how much time, money and other resources have you wasted on those 99.9 times you’ve missed? Even if you are successful, and successful is a term that requires definition and is relative, could you have been even more successful if you had a better understanding of your market?

Understanding Your Market Inside Out

Successful — very successful — companies have as intimate an understanding of their marketplace as possible. That means an understanding of their competition and its strategies. Successful companies understand their customers’ needs, anticipate how those needs might be changing in the face of environmental and other factors, and how their product or service needs to change with those changing needs.

Successful companies understand emerging opportunities and threats. They seek both out voluntarily, knowing both are inextricably linked to the other.

Navigating the Future: How to Reduce Business Uncertainty

Uncertainty is what keeps executives from a good night’s sleep. Conversely, less uncertainty should allow our executives to wake up refreshed, knowing they know as much as possible about the future and the manner in which they can influence it.

Of course, no one knows the future with precision. “The best-laid plans…”, as the saying goes. But surely there are cost-effective ways for companies to peel back the opaque layers of uncertainty revealing a less intimidating path forward through a dark tunnel.

Not that long ago there were relatively few options available for researchers. There was a trip to the library to read journals or books containing demographic data generated by government agencies. Or you could stand on a street corner and gather information from passers-by. If you had the resources you could hire a pollster or marketing research company who might undertake a telephone survey. Or you could do a test market of a product launch in a small environment that replicated on a much smaller scale the population you were targeting.

Challenges of Traditional Polling: The Decline of Reliability

Other than a trip to the library, those other research techniques were expensive and time-consuming. Were they accurate? Polling or surveys of a representative population were done using people sitting in rooms making random telephone calls asking questions from questionnaires drawn up by experts on a particular subject. 30 years ago, or even later than that, before everyone had a cell phone, it was easier to get hold of people who were willing to pick up a telephone and talk to the surveyor. That’s not so easy today. In fact, researchers and statisticians are unable to assign confidence intervals since in many cases the responses are no longer random, and are not representative of a population. They are simply answers from a non-random sample of a population to which percentages responding this way, or that way, have little statistical relevance.

Harnessing the Power of the Internet: Open Source Intelligence

While polling and surveys still may have value, they are becoming less and less reliable.

Today there is a far richer and, shall we call it, democratic way to gather information: it is called the internet. It includes absolutely every word, picture, and emoticon in every language on earth. It is there for anyone who wants to look at it. It can provide answers to perplexing questions provided using data by literally billions of people providing that data for free in unfiltered chat rooms, social media platforms, websites. It is called open source intelligence. It is ethically gathered and tabulated by organizations like IntelEdge and its partners at Intelligence Decision Partners.

Open Source Intelligence: Fast, Accurate, and Cost-Effective Research

It is fast. It is accurate. And, for less money in most cases than traditional research and with the proper technology tools and associated tradecraft it can provide more answers to more questions to more businesses, public institutions, and others who need to understand their environment.

There should be few excuses to abandon either the old ways of doing research, or not doing any research at all. The ways of eliminating uncertainty allowing those who need to see the way forward to sleep better at night exist like they never have before.