Ortega Group has interests in Oripler Foods, a food export company. One of Oripler’s products is ginger. In the current arrangement, Oripler Foods buys ginger from a collective of farmers, processes this ginger, packages it and exports it to various destinations, mainly in Europe.
But one of the most volatile prices is the price of ginger. When Oripler was first doing market research, farmers were selling a bag of ginger (about 120 kilograms) at UGX 250,000. Within two weeks, this price had moved to UGX 350,000. Within a month, the price was getting to UGX 500,000. Of course, this kept messing up with Oripler’s assumptions as regards its final pricing in destination countries. But there was one big lesson: that the ground is always shifting.
From this, Oripler Foods picked a learning, every company must never assume constancy of the ground. No one has a monopoly on the ground. The ground is always shifting. New entrants keep getting into the marketplace, some exit, existing people gain more power. The suppliers’ power shifts so do that of the buyers. There is no constant ground. The ground is always in flux.
Yet, many organizations miss this key aspect of the landscape. The fact that something about the landscape is always shifting, the weather is never the same. It’s not always cold, it’s not always dry, there’s shifts every day, and one must have the radar to catch these shifts.
What’s the point here? As companies strive to build better market intelligence systems, they must be aware that the ground in the market has no loyalties. Today’s information could as well be relevant tomorrow. Today’s assumptions do not hold tomorrow. If you are making a decision on Monday, you cannot make it based on the assumptions of Sunday or last week or last month.
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