Competitive Inteligence: It Is Wiser To Find Out Than To Suppose

By Author: Vijay K Shetty
Total Articles: 129
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It is often said that if you know yourself well, but not your enemy, for every victory gained, you will suffer one defeat.

How do companies counter attack their competitors. How do they know and anticipate every move and respond to it with the same intelligence and innovation?

They make use of competitive intelligence. This is the art of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, individuals, concepts, information, ideas or data needed to support executives and managers in strategic decision making. It includes the use of government intelligence, market intelligence and business intelligence.

As the word suggests, intelligence means an ability to outsmart others and beat them at their own game. Competitor intelligence is used as a tool to cash in on competitor weakness.

It is not an act of spying or getting insider information, competitive intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice, whose focus lies on the external environment of the business. It is used to identify in advance, the risks, opportunities, threats and weaknesses ...
... that would come in the path of the business, before they become obvious to everyone.

It involves more than analyzing competitors. It makes the organization more competitive with respect to its environment and the stakeholders, its customers, competitors, distributors, technologies and other macro economic factors.

Competitive intelligence is often confused with market research and business research but it cannot be used synonymous with these terms. Its areas of endeavor include assessment of strategies, competitor perceptions, and effectiveness of current operations, competitor capabilities and long-term market prospects. It also makes use of strategic and tactical intelligence.

This does bring up some concerns about ethics and behaviour, because the perception is related to the positive image and reputation of a company, and its competitiveness. Information found by illegal means cannot prove fruitful in the long run, and hence, it is better to pay a decent amount and make use of competitive intelligence rather than step into the black and bear unnecessary costs. Having said that, we also must understand the ethics behind competitive intelligence and the legalities involved. Before getting into the whole process of carrying out competitive intelligence, one must get familiar with the ethics and professional conduct.

The bottom-line is that competitive intelligence helps to get improved market knowledge, improved cross-functional relationships in the organization, greater confidence in making strategic plans, and improvements in product quality versus the competition.
In a nutshell, this helps to make companies more competitive and sustain itself in the race of bourgeoning companies.

Vijay K Shetty, Ezine Artices Expert Author.For more information: Competitive Intelligence


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