Market intelligence from the internet: An illustration using the biomass heating industry

Abstract

Extant research on marketing strategy suggests that most companies underuse web intelligence as publicly available data on the Internet are considered hard to access and analyse. This paper demonstrates how biomass home heating businesses can utilise the Internet for data collection and business insights. The market structure of the biomass heating industry was identified using the Google Correlate algorithm. The production rule 'that newer the product the higher is consumer search for the product' was operationalised using the correlations of the concept 'home heating equipment'. Intra-industry competition was assessed using Google's brand impression analysis and firm behaviour and performance were modelled using a differential equation relating product sales to marketing expenditures. Empirical analysis reveals that the product form "biomass home heating" is growing, pellet stoves and fireplace inserts top the lists of "stove" searches, there are two competitive clusters of biomass firms and the marketing spending for the industry is well below its optimum level needed to increase and maintain sales.