Investigating the impact of marketing intelligence on competitive advantage in SMEs

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate empirically the relationship between marketing intelligence on competitive advantage within a small and medium sized enterprises (SME) context. With marketing information it is intended all data usable within for a marketing purpose. First، the constitutive factors of marketing intelligence amongst SMEs were identified in the literature. After that، a quantitative study was performed analyzing the data through multivariate data analysis techniques، specifically using the Lisrel software. The results of the analysis are discussed and the paper ends with the conclusions، implications for practitioners and policy makers، limitations of the study and indications for future research. The results of this study show the importance of the marketing intelligence amongst SMEs. The type of information، resources of information and frequency of using information in SMEs have positive relation with competitive advantage.