Intelligence generation and superior customer value

It has become conventional wisdom that an organization's ability to continuously generate intelligence about customers' expressed and latent needs, and about how to satisfy those needs, is essential for it to continuously create superior customer value. However intelligence generation typically has been treated as a generic firm activity The authors propose that there are four distinct modes of intelligence generation, each of which is parr of a well-developed intelligence-generation capability. The article reports the results of an exploratory study that supports this proposition.