Complete Guide to Competitive IntelligencePublished May-08-2019 Show
From seamless sales operations to savvy social media usage, innovative marketing campaigns to effective go-to-market structures, some companies just always seem “one step ahead.” How do they do it? What competitive advantages do these organizations maintain — and are they immutable, something others can aspire to but never surpass? At Proactive Worldwide, we certainly don’t think so. Get insights into your competition by using the dynamic benefits of competitive intelligence (CI). Through CI’s unique methodological profiling, unlock the processes, competencies and strategic capabilities your organization was made for. What Is Competitive Intelligence?Competitive intelligence refers to the formal research process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data around specific business benchmarks, with the end goal to use that data to improve business core competencies. In other words, competitive intelligence brings extensive market research into your competitive landscape — looking at competitors’ practices, pricing, products and more — to spur smarter, more informed business decisions of your own. What Is the Importance of Competitive Intelligence?Competitive intelligence provides businesses their most detailed and accurate course of action toward competitive advantages. While nearly every single for-profit — and many not-for-profit — businesses want a distinct set of competitive advantages, not everyone understands how to get there. That’s where CI research, profiling and benchmarking comes in. The competitive advantage-based importance of CI insights can be broken into three parts:
What Are the Benefits of Competitive Intelligence?Businesses stand to experience numerous benefits when they undergo competitive intelligence and market insights analysis: 1. Glean Competitive InsightsThe methodologies at the core of CI create unique, evaluative data sets leading toward heightened competitive business activities. More so than any other approach, CI unearths qualitative and quantitative information on business activities from its most relevant sources. This allows organizations to see themselves with clearer eyes, understanding what they’re doing successfully and what keeps them lagging behind industry competitors. 2. Track Industry Trends and Predict Future MovesIn-depth competitive intelligence guides organizations through changes it can make today to improve tomorrow. Yet it also hands over external market knowledge that lends predictive insights into emerging industry trends, expectations, technologies, disruptors and more. For many, this foresight is a form of competitive advantage onto itself. 3. Improves Decision-Making ROIData-backed insights help declutter business initiatives. Organizations can take a hard look at current strengths and capability gaps, then re-prioritize investments and efforts to address them directly. There is less waste and less indecision — the ideal formula to see greater returns-on-business investments. 4. Boost Product and Service Speeds-to-MarketSpeed-to-market refers to the time it takes to see a product or service move from its initial ideation to public sales. Depending on the industry, average speed-to-market times will vary, as will the variables that go into creating, testing and launching a new commercial good. The more competitive a product or service’s ecosystem, the more essential it is for a company in that industry to improve its speed-to-market deliverables without sacrificing quality. CI research with a market focus enhances time-to-market, market entry and market defense capabilities. 5. Predict Competitions’ BehaviorsCompetitive intelligence was founded as a means for organizations to benchmark operations against top competitors. With the information gleaned across aggregation, synthesis and action, a business is primed to better predict a competitor’s behaviors across business domains — then beat them to the punch. 6. Make Business Decisions With ConfidenceCritical insights and market intelligence clarify the precise, data-backed actions and opportunities for companies to take. It illustrates how that opportunity can benefit the organization’s strategic priorities as a whole, plus gives objective defenses behind tomorrow’s business investments. What Industries Use Competitive Intelligence?Numerous industries use competitive intelligence to inform improvements across operations, technology, customer satisfaction ratings, market entry or market defense practices and more. Six such sectors are outlined below. 1. TechnologyThe tech industry seems to evolve at megabit speeds. Changes in consumer expectations often parallel shifts in wider technological affordances and access, with plenty of organizations salivating to provide the latest and greatest commercial and enterprise technological goods. Technology-focused companies can wield CI research to improve many key capabilities:
2. HealthcareThose in the healthcare industry navigate substantial government regulations amidst changes to the insurance market, market stakeholders and patients-as-consumers as a whole. Competitive intelligence can help the healthcare sector balance its service orientation with still-profitable operations across:
3. Pharmaceuticals and BiotechnologyLike the healthcare industry, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies face an extensive regulatory environment in a high-cost, multi-dimensional sector. Competitive monitoring and integrative analytics alleviate operational risks for those in the life sciences, medical device, pharma and medical specialization fields by improving:
4. Manufacturing and Industrial SectorsCommercial and industrial manufacturing has undergone a complete transformation in the 21st century. Scaled-up global competition, combined with emerging, automated technologies and changing supply and demand models, have irreversibly altered the landscape of the manufacturing industry. Competitive intelligence gives power back to manufacturers, allowing organizations to maximize their strengths today while minimizing market risks tomorrow. Competitive insights for the manufacturing industry assists with:
5. Consumer GoodsFrom household furniture to personal hygiene products, e-commerce clothing lines to spiked sparkling water, the consumer goods and retail industry contains businesses of every size and specialization. All these organizations’ concerns, however, align under the lens of competitive intelligence. Market monitoring and CI consulting explore opportunities for retailers to improve:
6. Financial ServicesExternally, trust and transparency are paramount to consumer perceptions of the financial sector. Internally, operations balance compliance needs with disruptive technology changing the nature of traditional banking, lending, investing and financial advising. Key capabilities enhanced by financial service CI include:
How to Conduct and Use Competitive IntelligenceThere is no single way to perform competitive intelligence. Instead, competitive insights research chooses a series of target domains, or topics, into which organizations conduct in-depth studies. The findings from today’s competitive research become the raw insights leveraged for tomorrow’s business growth. This guide identifies seven target domains for organizations to dedicate their competitive intelligence efforts toward:
1. Media Attention InsightsMedia attention insights refer to public-facing announcements, promotions and updates made by your industry competitors. It includes both self-generated promotions as well as ones from other publications or organizations, within and outside your field. Media attention insights are a poignant way to keep a pulse on the latest competitor “buzz.” Any mention of your competition in the news constitutes a significant PR learning opportunity. The conversations and traffic generated by media attention further bolster a company’s chance to perform competitive intelligence research into this critical topic. Organizations can use any of the following to conduct media attention analysis:
Media attention competitive analysis lends organizations the ability to:
2. Personnel and Culture InsightsPersonnel and culture insights provide a data-backed perspective on what working for industry competition is truly like. From office culture and talent acquisition practices to the habits and skills of executive leadership, personnel insights deliver quantitative and qualitative reports on the pros and cons of a competitor’s atmosphere. With that data, organizations can assess where others in the field are investing time- and talent-management resources, gleaning predictive insights on where the industry’s overall talent and culture needles are moving. CI consultant firms conduct personnel and cultural competitive intelligence by analyzing:
Conducting competitive intelligence into personnel and culture allows businesses to:
3. Consumer InsightsGarnering consumer feedback has long been one of the tenets of market intelligence research. As one of the most popular competitive intelligence services available to organizations today, consumer insights allow real businesses to know what real people think of their products, services and overall brand — as well as their competitors’. Consumer analyses come backed by qualitative and quantitative research methods. CI firms initiating consumer intelligence insights for their clients most often gather data through:
With consumer intelligence analytics, organizations can:
4. Social Listening InsightsSocial listening competitive intelligence blends media attention analysis with consumer insights. In other words, it tracks what actual consumers are saying about competition online, as well as the methods and strategies those competitors deploy to widen their digital authority and conversion rates. Social listening pays particular attention to digitally branded social media and content marketing. By tracking content channels, topics, posting rates, subscriptions, consumer interactions, ratings and more, social listening insights give businesses eyes and ears into direct consumer opinions. Organizations interested in gleaning insights from social listening can begin tracking competitors across:
Social listening insights allow a business to:
5. Product and Service InsightsEvidence-based insights on product and service positioning, pricing, packaging and market share are some of the highest value and most sought after information in the competitive intelligence arena. Every business wants — and needs — to understand their competitive advantages related to products and services, as well as the strength of current product development, sales and customer support strategies. Product and service competitive insights give metric-backed data into these concerns, allowing organizations to propel their offerings to the next level. Organizations can examine a spectrum of market-related metrics:
Competitive intelligence research focused on products and services gives businesses a distinct advantage to:
6. Sales InsightsSales competitive intelligence allows organizations to understand what competitors are doing to widen their market share. What are emerging and core sales strategies? Do competitors offer promotions and incentives? Are there unique selling propositions (USPs) the competition claims that consumers respond well to? How can you imbue more value-adding, persuasive messaging into your own sales pipeline? CI firms glean competitive sales insights by tracking many sales and marketing functions:
Conducting sales competitive intelligence allows businesses to:
7. Vendor and Partnership InsightsVendor and partnership insights provide a final competitive analysis platform. Organizations examining vendors and partners aim to better understand the collaborative relationships the competition maintains across supply chains and workflows, as well as which partnerships are helping or hindering their own operations. CI firms will analyze:
Benchmarking vendor relations can help contribute to many strategic changes in an organization, including:
How Do You Conduct Competitive Intelligence Research?There are several research methods available to conduct formal competitive and market intelligence operations. However, an organization must first determine if they’ll perform the CI research in one of two ways — internally or with the assistance of a CI firm.
Across research functions, CI and market intelligence can be conducted using any of these research methods:
Risks of Not Performing Competitive IntelligenceThere are distinct costs associated with neglecting or all-out ignoring competitive intelligence benchmarking — costs which can trigger a domino-like chain of strategic business shortcomings. 1. Heightened Risk on Strategic and Tactical DecisionsThe wealth of information provided by CI and market research prevents organizations from having decision-making tunnel vision, introducing changes and executing judgments without proper data. It’s akin to playing darts in the dark. Your business may hit a bullseye, but you’ll have no idea why — and, more importantly, have no way to repeat it. Organizations introduce themselves to higher amounts of risk across many of the following core business functions:
2. Witness Competitors Outperform You — And Not Know WhyWatch from the sidelines as industry competition discovers new, innovative and effective ways to grow. Whether that growth is due to expanded technology, fresh human talent, new leadership or relaunched product features will be guesswork — and hardly educated guesswork at that. As a result, your own business goals and strategic direction stalls, uninformed by competitor planned actions, market needs or milestone roadmaps rectifying process or operational gaps. 3. Lose Market ShareLost market share is calculated by comparing current sales percentages against sales figures over a past period. Sliding percentages indicate a business is not making equitable sales in their industry, either because its lost customers or the customers it does have are reducing purchasing quantities or qualities. Lost market share can strike for many reasons. From a market downfall to industry disruptors with radical yet innovate business models, your organization stays in the dark regarding its reduced sales figures. It’s an unsustainable business position, one avoidable with competitive intelligence. Go Beyond This Competitive Insights Guide With Proactive WorldwideNot all data is made equal — but all organizations have the chance to wield data to their competitive advantage. Competitive benchmarking and market intelligence services from Proactive Worldwide gives your business the information it needs to better understand high-value intersecting targets — your market share, your customers and your competition. Get in touch to learn what we can discover for your business. Contact Us How can a company enhance differentiation at the forward end of the value chain system?How can a company enhance differentiation at the forward end of the value chain system? Participate in cooperative advertising. Set standards and train channel partners to implement them. Offer incentives to downstream partners to enhance customer value.
When a company has a proficiency in performing a strategically and competitively important value chain activity better than its rivals it is said to have?When a company has a proficiency in performing a strategically and competitively important value chain activity better than its rivals, it is said to have: a competitive advantage over rivals.
When an activity becomes something a company has learned to perform proficiently and capably The company is said to have?When an activity becomes something a company has learned to perform proficiently and capably, the company is said to have: A. a competence.
When a company performs a particular competitively important activity truly well in comparison to its rivals it is said to have a?A. is a more competitively valuable strength than a competence because of the key role the activities play in the company's strategy. When a company performs a particular competitively important activity truly well in comparison to its rivals, it is said to have a: C. distinctive competence.
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