Competitive Intelligence

How to use Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence can really help to give us greater insight into our market place, deeper competitor understanding and ultimately help us to make vital decisions – the right vital decisions that is.

What is competitive intelligence? How can competitive intelligence fit into the daily running of our company and the strategic planning process? Do we really need competitive intelligence?

Ask yourself this question – why do some firms within an industry always come out on top, whereas others, with equal or even superior resources seem to fail? The answer is. . . . . competitive intelligence.

So how should we use competitive intelligence within our organization? How should we structure and organize our competitive intelligence? Information is, after all, only helpful if we organize it and know what to do with it.

Let’s take a little look at how we can effectively use competitive intelligence within our organization:

• Product marketing – some companies aim their competitive intelligence inside their product marketing group, which is more concerned with beating the main competition than actually growing their own share of the product market. Success might therefore be measured on successfully decreasing your competitors share of the product market, rather than increasing your own.
• Market research – some companies (especially those with a strong market research group) conduct their competitive intelligence within the market research department, gathering lots of information about the perception of their competitors from their own customers.
• Sales – very often the sales team are good at collecting competitive intelligence, although you have to be careful to try and keep the two concepts separate if at all possible.

How to Use Competitive Intelligence

If your company or organization does have a competitive intelligence department, you have to be very careful that everybody doesn’t get a bit carried away with it all. After all, we’re only human and some snippets of information which can be disguised as competitive intelligence are actually nothing more than an interesting bit of gossip which, in real terms, does your company no good whatsoever.

Effectively distributing the useful competitive intelligence (not gossip, that distributes itself well enough) can be another stumbling block. Some companies find that a regular email or newsletter is sufficient to keep all relevant departments up to speed on the latest developments, others find the need to include it in their management meetings, or both. It really does depend on you, your organization and your staff.

Competitive intelligence does help to stack the odds in your favor and help you to keep one step ahead of the competition. Generally the organization which always seems to be at the top of the ladder even in tough market conditions, is probably the company who is very competent in competitive intelligence and has regular daily, weekly or monthly updates.