What’s meant by Competitive Intelligence? It’s obviously something we are passionate about, but what does it really mean?
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the collection, collation and analysis of information. To help you find out what’s happening and explain why it’s happening. Outline how things could develop and then offer the options to make better decisions.
CI helps you avoid surprises. Think more moves ahead, minimise uncertainty, differentiate and stay ahead of the competition. It’s the unspoken, hidden key to success.
And it’s an essential aspect of developing your business strategy. It’s the analysis turning information into Intelligence. By collating it in a structured, consistent and ethical manner using open source. And by talking to people.
CI helps integrate external market and competitive forces into your strategic planning. It enhances and embraces the whole of your business. From marketing, finance, purchasing, strategic planning, sales to operations.
Remember that everything should be and can be conducted in a legal, ethical and above board. It adheres to trade secret and antitrust laws and your code of behaviour.
What are the uses of Competitive Intelligence?
CI plays an essential part in developing your growth strategy to:
- Provide counter-competitive strategies
- Benchmarking against your competitors.
- Anticipate future market opportunities and disruptions.
- Determine the effectiveness of your value proposition and market position.
Competitive Intelligence is instrumental when launching a product or creating a new market. There are many tools associated with CI. These include scenario planning, red team analysis and wargaming. Win-loss analysis, early warning systems and competitor and market surveillance.
Why is CI essential?
Competitive Intelligence objectively highlights your industry differentiation. To enable you to really understand your market and then take relevant action to prevent risks and create opportunities.
Competitive analysis offers you a solid foundation for a successful strategy. It ensures your operations are aligned with the external environment you face and want to succeed in.
Knowing your competitors, distributors, agents, suppliers, technologies, regulations and other issues you face allows you to manage and make the most of risks and opportunities.
Competitive Intelligence is a combination of understanding and making the most of the critical internal and external factors to develop an excellent value proposition. A proposition that gives you value-adding differentiation. That’s why we offer CI services, including:
- Competitor analysis
- External market analysis
- Competitor monitoring and reporting
- Isolating, assessing and evaluating emerging technologies
- Value Chain analysis
- Inhouse Competitive Intelligence process implementation, consulting and management
- Competitor benchmarking to isolate their performance and best practice
- Market segmentation and market sizing analysis
We asked what is meant by Competitive Intelligence? It’s the hidden secret of success. It’s fantastic if you wish to grow, enter new global markets. Or move into new verticals, develop strong partnerships and launch new products/services. CI is the differentiation when building a robust, successful strategy.
