Driving business growth with Competitive Intelligence

To gain competitive intelligence a business accumulates information from multiple sources, which is sourced ethically. It is collected for a business to be able to anticipate and respond to challenges in the marketplace before they arise. 

CI is an intensive exercise, with much research put into understanding your competitors strategies. These strategies can include their business plans, their target market, their advertisements and how they operate. Competitive intelligence also helps you understand how external events and factors impact your rivals, and how their supply chain reacts to it. 

CI holds different levels of importance to different departments within an organization. Sales people will leverage competitive intelligence in a manner that is different to how a product engineer would use the same. Top management can use this data to devise strategies to gain market share. 

The end goal behind competitive intelligence is to ensure that no department in your organization is caught napping by your competitors. 

A typical scenario for gathering intelligence includes these elements:

Monitoring

Competitors and their activities are monitored. Any upcoming launch is observed, including marketing and advertising campaigns. Competitor social media channels are scrutinized as well. 

Surveys

Large scale surveys are conducted among demographics that would typically constitute the target audience for you and your competitors. A variety of questions are asked which allows businesses to glean insights into customer thinking and behavior.