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Definition of Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence involves systematically observing, collecting, analyzing, and distributing insights about the external business environment and competitors to inform decision-making. It refers to gathering, analyzing, and using information on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence can come from online sources like company websites, press releases, and social media, or from offline sources like salespeople, employees, vendors, and consumers. The goal is to understand factors like a competitor's strengths, weaknesses, and strategies to help a company produce goods or services more effectively.

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SAYMON ISABELO SARMIENTO
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159 views3 pages

Definition of Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence involves systematically observing, collecting, analyzing, and distributing insights about the external business environment and competitors to inform decision-making. It refers to gathering, analyzing, and using information on competitors, customers, and other market factors that contribute to competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence can come from online sources like company websites, press releases, and social media, or from offline sources like salespeople, employees, vendors, and consumers. The goal is to understand factors like a competitor's strengths, weaknesses, and strategies to help a company produce goods or services more effectively.

Uploaded by

SAYMON ISABELO SARMIENTO
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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DEFINITION OF COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Competitive intelligence is the systematic process of observing, collecting and analyzing relevant
information about the external business environment and distributing the resulting insights within an
organization in order to make informed decisions.

Ito ay isang teknik/strategy ng isang organizations analyze collected data and information to develop
effective and efficient business practices.

Competitive intelligence, sometimes referred to as corporate intelligence, refers to the ability to gather,
analyze, and use information collected on competitors, customers, and other market factors that
contribute to a business's competitive advantage.

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE SOURCES

The collection of data for competitive intelligence can be online, can be by talking to people or can be by
other data collection methods.

ONLINE APPROACH

1. LOOKING INTO COMPANY WEBSITE—businesses can get idea of product benefits, target
audiences, strategy changes and product prices by looking into company website.
-Analyzing their website content and user experience using tools such as Google Analytics
provides insight into their positioning, traffic, keywords, and search ranking.
2. PRESS RELEASES--New products, expansion news, and all new staff can be announced through
company press release.
3. TRACKING SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS—if competitors share information about products that haven’t
been launched yet, tracking social media posts to gather information can prove to be useful.
-Analyzing social media conversations can reveal how your brand compares to your competition
in terms of customer sentiment and share-of-voice helping you inform your brand strategy

OFFLINE APPROACH
1. SALESPOEPLE – a company’s salespeople can be useful to gather information about rivals while
communicating with prospect consumers.
2. EMPLOYESS – employees can gather information while attending industry conferences.
3. VENDORS
4. CONSUMERS

Within any organization, competitive intelligence means different things to different people and
departments. For example, to a sales representative, it may refer to tactical advice on how best
to bid for a lucrative contract. To top management, it may mean cultivating unique marketing
insights used to gain market share against a formidable competitor.

Competitive advantage refers to factors that allow a company to produce goods or services better or
more cheaply than its rivals.
Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat
Conclusion
Competitive intelligence is pivotal to business success across a vast amount of industries. Great
examples of its benefits can be found almost anywhere, from the financial sector, to the sports world, to
tech startups. In each of these cases, the common denominator is that organizations who are able to
outperform their peers do so by mastering the collection, interpretation and distribution of competitive
intelligence.
..

What are the best competitive intelligence solutions?

Websites, news mentions, regulatory filings, social media, customer reviews - there are many online
sources where you can find information on your competitors depending on your market, industry, and
company goals. If you are looking for refined information such as pricing strategies, partnership approach,
etc., then primary research of your competitors’ will be good. If you are looking for basic facts about a
competitor (executives, the board of directors, etc.), then secondary research of the internet will give you
what you are looking for.

To begin with, you can consider setting up Google Alerts. You’ll get an alert whenever an
organization/keyword is mentioned that you are monitoring. Although I must warn you:

 There will be a lot of noise and irrelevant content.


 If you are monitoring large companies or trending keywords, the rush of updates will be too
much to handle and make sense of.
 Keeping track of all this huge information and then extracting actionable insights from them
is the major challenge.
There are numerous other tools that can help you mitigate the above challenges.. Which tool works for
you depends on your use case. For example: For tracking your market/industry/competitors, you can opt
for specialized competitive intelligence solution providers like Contify. They keep you notified about
business partnerships, business expansion updates, M&As, etc. Contify also offers a free trial.

For tracking competitor pricing, you can go for tools like Prisync, etc.

What is the difference between competitive intelligence and marketing research?


Let us understand what competitive intelligence means and here is my definition.

Competitive intelligence is about knowing how good your business is versus competition.
Acknowledging the presence of your competitors (and their strengths) helps you in two
ways:

1. Know your position in the marketplace.


2. Formulate next steps to compete with them effectively.
Gathering competitive intelligence involves market research. More importantly, you learn
more about your competition, their strengths, vulnerabilities, and opportunities that you
have. You can have an in-house dedicated team for this or get specialist vendors to do this.

Know the best sources for the different types of competitive intelligence that you are
gathering (e.g., strategic, marketing, financial, etc.) Use the free templates in it to fill
information about your competitors.

So, what is market research?

Market research is about unearthing information about your competitors, industries,


geographies, technologies, etc. through secondary and primary research. Market research
need not necessarily be about your competition. It can span a plethora of things other than
your competitors.

Gathering competitive intelligence results in action that helps your business. On the other
hand, market research is about finalizing the approach that you’d like to take to:

 Launch a new product


 Enter a new geography
 Add new features to your product
 Understand consumer preferences and tastes
Market research may or may not result in action. A lot of companies undertake market
research and have a dedicated team/outsource it to do it for you. Competitive intelligence
and market research can be mutually exclusive for an organization. Based on what you are
after, it is important to determine whether you need an active competitive intelligence
program in your organization or a market research exercise.

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