Competitive Intelligence''s Role in Market Research

Competitive intelligence or CI is necessary ethical discipline for the taking of decisions based on the understanding of the competitive environment.

Research shows that companies with established programs of CI get greater profits for action than those of the same industry that does not have programs of CI. It is so important for that they to take decisions in companies of small or average port to know what it is for coming, as is for the presidents of the great companies listed in Fortune 500.

Thus,is possible to a company to be practising some form of CI and not perceive it. Any employee who visits an event, he reads a periodical, or talks with friends of the same economic sector, is making research (one of the components of the CI). But other components of the CI generally do not meet in the businesses.

Currently the CI add value to the collection of information and the strategical planning when introducing a system disciplined not only to the collection of information, but also when carrying through analyses and spreading its "findings" of form that are useful to the necessities of the decision takers.

The speed of the technological development and the growth of the global commerce, means that the current environment business-oriented is transforming more quickly than before. The entrepreneurs and average small professionals of the e companies, cannot more give themselves to the luxury to depend on the instinct or of the intuition when they take strategical decisions in its businesses. In much sectors (especially where the competition is each bigger time), the consequence to take a decision missed, can be to take the company to lose sales or to the bankruptcy.

Research shows that competitive intelligence increases the "level of comfort" of the strategical planning of the direction of the company. But after all what it is same Competitive Intelligence? Many confuse with Emotional Intelligence, others with Management of the Knowledge, others with Business Intelligence and still others speak in espionage. Prescott and Miller, comment that the "work of Sun Tzu on military intelligence, continues being read and are considered the father of intelligence.

For journalist Larry Kahaner, competitive intelligence is a systematic program of collection and analysis of the information on activities of the competitors and general trends of the businesses, aiming at to reach the goals of the company. Therefore, Competitive Intelligence or CI is one necessary ethical discipline for the taking of decisions based on the understanding of the current and future competitive environment.

In business, you always need to know what your competitors are doing. To survive you must perform competitive intelligence activities and monitor the broader market for new developments that could affect your company, your products and brands, suppliers, and distributors.

Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively, and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you will significantly increase your margins and profitability.

There's one resource that's often underutilized in this regard: your competitors' websites.

Today's digital footprint, while increasing corporate transparency and yielding greater power to consumers in the marketing dialogue, enables marketers to measure conversions. Companies spend enormous sums of money on maintaining their websites so that they can attract and influence prospects, customers, and analyst.

Your competitors may wish they could block you from their websites, but remember that the information they post there is public. If you aren't harvesting this rich - and free - resource, you are the loser!

Here are 5 things you must do regularly to effectively track your competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets:

1. Identify your competitors

Now, this may seem odd to you. You’re probably thinking, “doesn't a company know who its competitors are?” Not always. New firms come seemingly out of nowhere, preempting existing companies with different technologies or approaches they never saw coming.

Often a company in an adjacent area will change its positioning to try and address your market, or a new startup may emerge in a related area. You need to create a master list of your key competitors and make sure you keep this up to date.

To do this, Google the terms, which describe your industry, your products and services. You can also use a little known feature in Google. In the search box, type in "related:www.yourcompanyname.com" and Google will display a list of companies that it considers related to yours. Look for new companies that show up and see if any of these pose a threat.

2. Check your competitors’ home pages for positioning changes

When you visit a company's website, first look at its home page to see if they have made changes to the way they describe their products and services. Carefully scrutinize how they emphasize different features or benefits and how they are positioning themselves. Sometimes, you can learn a lot even from the subtle changes your competitors make on their home page.

3. Review the trade shows they participate in

Trade shows can take a big chunk out of a company’s marketing budget, so it is important to know which shows your competitors participate in.

Regularly review the events page on their websites and maintain a spreadsheet with names, dates and locations of the shows that your competitors plan to be at. You can then see which ones you might want to sign up for.

If you spot one of them at a new show, you might ask yourself, "why are they exhibiting at this defense-related show?" It might be an indicator of a new market they are entering – perhaps one that you should consider as well.

4. Create a competitive intelligence database of white papers and webinars

Increasingly, white papers and webinars have become the preferred way for a company to establish its mind share and leadership -- so this is another area you should be tracking. You should maintain a list of titles of the whitepapers and webinars your competitors create or host to get an idea of their new direction.

You may not learn much from one single event or white paper, but you'll learn a lot when you look at these as a whole. You'll see trends and patterns that clearly indicate how these companies are positioning or repositioning themselves.

5. Check who they are hiring and firing

Once in a while, check the management team and job postings pages on your competitors’ websites. Try and see whether your competitors have added or removed any names from their management team. This is often the only way you may learn that your key competitor has lost their VP of Sales; no press announcement is likely to be made about such events.

Competitive intelligence is rewarding, but not easy

You’ll gain a lot by making these activities part of your routine, but this work does take serious time, effort, and discipline!

If you don't have the time to invest in such activities, you can always stick to just using Google Alerts to get the top-level news about your competitors. But the truth is, you're short-changing yourself if you do this. Quality competitive analysis may not come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your business success.

The good news is that some new automated competitive intelligence tools are now starting to become available. Such tools can automatically scan company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one of these to make this job significantly easier.

Market research plays two roles in the communication processes of any business system. First, it is part of the marketing intelligence feedback process. It provides decision makers with data on the effectiveness of the current employed techniques and provides insights for necessary changes. Second, market research is the primary tool for exploring new opportunities in the media marketplace. Segmenting, questioning and evaluating the targeted markets are the steps to acquire the necessary knowledge regarding the publics' preferences, tendencies and interests in relation, for example, to contemporary political news.

According to scholars, research can be viewed as playing three functional roles; descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive. Its descriptive function includes gathering and presenting statements of fact. The diagnostic function serves as the explanatory step in the process. Finally, the predictive function uses the researcher's descriptive and diagnostic research outcomes to predict the results of the proposed strategy under study.

As an applied research tool, the focus group research technique has to test a hypothesis on high-involvement decision making, or public information processing, understand the tendencies of the public and of course evaluate the tested hypothesis. Thus, before organizing and conducting a focus group, the first step for the moderator is to define the subject of research, formulate an understandable hypothesis, prepare the setting, and recruit the focus group participants. After these steps are completed, the moderator is ready to lead an in-depth discussion on the particular topic or concept. The goal of the focus group is to understand what people have to say and why. The emphasis is on getting participants talking at length and in detail about the subject at hand.

Unfortunately, some of the very strengths of such a focus group can also become disadvantages. For example, the immediacy and apparent understandability of focus group findings can mislead instead of inform. The small size of the participating group can also be misleading and not represent adequately the real public opinion on the issue, directing the moderator to accept simple findings as overall truths. As the focus group research is data-driven, with findings and conclusions being drawn directly from the information provided, the whole method can be characterized as inductive in its approach, minimizing the originality of the findings to a mere description of the public opinion based on the available facts. Finally, the premises where the focus group is conducted, the demographics of the participants, the moderator's thinking on the issue, the lack of adequate facts, or the behavior of some of the participants in the group discussion, can cause the focus group research results to be false and the whole process to be time consuming and cost-ineffective.

Concluding, a focus group by definition is an informal research procedure that develops qualitative information instead of hard data. More specifically, it can identify the range of attitudes/opinions of its participants. Such an insight can help the moderator formulate hypotheses and questions for a later quantitative survey.

In business, you always need to know what your competitors are doing. To survive you must perform competitive intelligence activities and monitor the broader market for new developments that could affect your company, your products and brands, suppliers, and distributors.

Tracking your competitors is the only way to make to make sure you are thwarting threats, taking advantage of opportunities, marketing effectively, and, ultimately, winning in the marketplace. By performing competitive intelligence, you will significantly increase your margins and profitability.

There's one resource that's often underutilized in this regard: your competitors' websites.

Today's digital footprint, while increasing corporate transparency and yielding greater power to consumers in the marketing dialogue, enables marketers to measure conversions. Companies spend enormous sums of money on maintaining their websites so that they can attract and influence prospects, customers, and analyst.

Your competitors may wish they could block you from their websites, but remember that the information they post there is public. If you aren't harvesting this rich - and free - resource, you are the loser!

Here are 5 things you must do regularly to effectively track your competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets:

1. Identify your competitors

Now, this may seem odd to you. You're probably thinking, "doesn't a company know who its competitors are?" Not always. New firms come seemingly out of nowhere, preempting existing companies with different technologies or approaches they never saw coming.

Often a company in an adjacent area will change its positioning to try and address your market, or a new startup may emerge in a related area. You need to create a master list of your key competitors and make sure you keep this up to date.

To do this, Google the terms, which describe your industry, your products and services. You can also use a little known feature in Google. In the search box, type in "related:www.yourcompanyname.com" and Google will display a list of companies that it considers related to yours. Look for new companies that show up and see if any of these pose a threat.

2. Check your competitors' home pages for positioning changes

When you visit a company's website, first look at its home page to see if they have made changes to the way they describe their products and services. Carefully scrutinize how they emphasize different features or benefits and how they are positioning themselves. Sometimes, you can learn a lot even from the subtle changes your competitors make on their home page.

3. Review the trade shows they participate in

Trade shows can take a big chunk out of a company's marketing budget, so it is important to know which shows your competitors participate in.

Regularly review the events page on their websites and maintain a spreadsheet with names, dates and locations of the shows that your competitors plan to be at. You can then see which ones you might want to sign up for.

If you spot one of them at a new show, you might ask yourself, "why are they exhibiting at this defense-related show?" It might be an indicator of a new market they are entering perhaps one that you should consider as well.

4. Create a competitive intelligence database of white papers and webinars

Increasingly, white papers and webinars have become the preferred way for a company to establish its mind share and leadership -- so this is another area you should be tracking. You should maintain a list of titles of the whitepapers and webinars your competitors create or host to get an idea of their new direction.

You may not learn much from one single event or white paper, but you'll learn a lot when you look at these as a whole. You'll see trends and patterns that clearly indicate how these companies are positioning or repositioning themselves.

5. Check who they are hiring and firing

Once in a while, check the management team and job postings pages on your competitors' websites. Try and see whether your competitors have added or removed any names from their management team. This is often the only way you may learn that your key competitor has lost their VP of Sales; no press announcement is likely to be made about such events.

Competitive intelligence is rewarding, but not easy

You'll gain a lot by making these activities part of your routine, but this work does take serious time, effort, and discipline!

If you don't have the time to invest in such activities, you can always stick to just using Google Alerts to get the top-level news about your competitors. But the truth is, you're short-changing yourself if you do this. Quality competitive analysis may not come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your business success.

The good news is that some new automated competitive intelligence tools are now starting to become available. Such tools can automatically scan company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one of these to make this job significantly easier.

Market research plays two roles in the communication processes of any business system. First, it is part of the marketing intelligence feedback process. It provides decision makers with data on the effectiveness of the current employed techniques and provides insights for necessary changes. Second, market research is the primary tool for exploring new opportunities in the media marketplace. Segmenting, questioning and evaluating the targeted markets are the steps to acquire the necessary knowledge regarding the publics' preferences, tendencies and interests in relation, for example, to contemporary political news.

According to scholars, research can be viewed as playing three functional roles; descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive. Its descriptive function includes gathering and presenting statements of fact. The diagnostic function serves as the explanatory step in the process. Finally, the predictive function uses the researcher's descriptive and diagnostic research outcomes to predict the results of the proposed strategy under study.

As an applied research tool, the focus group research technique has to test a hypothesis on high-involvement decision making, or public information processing, understand the tendencies of the public and of course evaluate the tested hypothesis. Thus, before organizing and conducting a focus group, the first step for the moderator is to define the subject of research, formulate an understandable hypothesis, prepare the setting, and recruit the focus group participants. After these steps are completed, the moderator is ready to lead an in-depth discussion on the particular topic or concept. The goal of the focus group is to understand what people have to say and why. The emphasis is on getting participants talking at length and in detail about the subject at hand.

Unfortunately, some of the very strengths of such a focus group can also become disadvantages. For example, the immediacy and apparent understandability of focus group findings can mislead instead of inform. The small size of the participating group can also be misleading and not represent adequately the real public opinion on the issue, directing the moderator to accept simple findings as overall truths. As the focus group research is data-driven, with findings and conclusions being drawn directly from the information provided, the whole method can be characterized as inductive in its approach, minimizing the originality of the findings to a mere description of the public opinion based on the available facts. Finally, the premises where the focus group is conducted, the demographics of the participants, the moderator's thinking on the issue, the lack of adequate facts, or the behavior of some of the participants in the group discussion, can cause the focus group research results to be false and the whole process to be time consuming and cost-ineffective.

Concluding, a focus group by definition is an informal research procedure that develops qualitative information instead of hard data. More specifically, it can identify the range of attitudes/opinions of its participants. Such an insight can help the moderator formulate hypotheses and questions for a later quantitative survey.