Mastering the Market Intelligence Challenge

To thrive in rapidly changing economies in regions such as Asia and Africa, multinationals need to take new approaches to gathering and using market intelligence.

Murali D.R. Chari, Kimberlee Luce, and Inder Thukral

WINTER 2017

Multinational corporations have invested huge sums in emerging markets — more than $3 trillion since 1998, by one estimate.¹ Returns from these investments, however, have sometimes been disappointing. The Economist, for example, has reported that the return on emerging-market investments for the average multinational corporation has been “mediocre” and that some companies “have lost a ton of money.”²

Even when managers think they are performing well in emerging markets, they ...