Competitive intelligence refers to the process of in-depth researching and analysis of market trends and rival companies. This helps a company track its current position in the industry and simultaneously helps in making sound decisions for further progress. Although implementation of competitive intelligence is frequently mistaken as spying, it has no relation whatsoever with spying into another organization’s confidential files. All that CI accesses are published articles and other media. CI deals with defending the company against its competitors. It can help in giving intuitive insights to the company about the offensive attacks that are about to be launched against them and how they can avoid those.
The four phases of implementing competitive intelligence
1. Planning
Competitive intelligence requires skillful planning and systematic direction towards success of the company. Planning on company’s growth deals with taking into consideration of how CI must operate and what are the factors that would prove to be barriers. Few questions that a company must ask itself during the phase of planning for competitive intelligence are as follows:
- Why do we need this technology?
- What difference will it make if we apply this technology to our organization?
- How will it improve our company’s performance?
- How much will it cost?
After getting the answers for the above questions, analysts need to direct their companies to an improved course of action and proportionately shift their work patterns towards executing competitive intelligence.
2. Collecting
Collection of data and researching about a rival’s techniques is a decisive feature of CI. Data about rival companies can be collected from diverse resources. It can be anything from being company’s yearly magazine, it’s CEO’s interview given to some news channel, or blogs that they post on it’s websites, which can prove vital in providing ample information about company’s future ventures.
3. Analyzing
This phase is considered to be the most crucial phase, as analysis of the data gathered so far is now initiated. In this phase, analysts have to map down the possibilities of future ventures based on the weight of current random data that they have on their hands.
4. Delivering
During the delivery phase of competitive intelligence, analysts have to finally suggest an alternative course of action. It is an intense phase for analysts, as they have to deliver a verdict that can change the course as well as the future of the concerned company. Besides, arguments placed by the executives in the company have to be answered accurately by the analysts, as well.
While this is the cycle that gives us a detailed explanation of how competitive intelligence works in general, there are different industries that wish to implement CI for their respective specializations. No matter what your industry-type is, certain solid benefits of implementing CI remain constant. These include data on:
- Industry cost curves
- New products competitors are launching
- Market intelligence
- Accomplishment of company’s vision and mission