H O P P E R P E D I A ©
-Brian Hammons
Defining Intelligence Tactics
Most businesspeople are so busy working for their business or in their business that they never find time to work on their business. They fail to anticipate what might happen or what they might be able to make happen.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is more than analyzing competitors — it is about making the organization more competitive relative to its entire environment and stakeholders: customers, competitors, distributors, technologies, macro-economic data etc.
A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.
The focus is on the external business environment.
Organizations use competitive intelligence to compare themselves to other organizations ("competitive benchmarking"), to identify risks and opportunities in their markets, and to pressure-test their plans against market response (war gaming), which enable them to make informed decisions. Most firms today realize the importance of knowing what their competitors are doing and how the industry is changing, and the information gathered allows organizations to realize their strengths and weaknesses.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Given that competitor analysis is an essential component of corporate strategy, it is argued that most firms do not conduct this type of analysis systematically enough. Instead, many enterprises operate on what is called “informal impressions, conjectures, and intuition gained through the tidbits of information about competitors every manager continually receives.” As a result, traditional environmental scanning places many firms at risk of dangerous competitive blindspots due to a lack of robust competitor analysis
Strategic Analysis
Strategic Intelligence (SI): focus is on the longer term, looking at issues affecting a company’s competitiveness over the course of a couple of years. The actual time horizon for SI ultimately depends on the industry and how quickly it’s changing. The general questions that SI answers are, ‘Where should we as a company be in x Years?’ and 'What are the strategic risks and opportunities facing us?' This type of intelligence work involves among others the identification of weak signals and application of methodology and process called Strategic Early Warning (SEW), first introduced by Gilad, followed by Steven Shaker and Victor Richardson, Alessandro Comai and Joaquin Tena,and others. According to Gilad, 20% of the work of competitive intelligence practitioners should be dedicated to strategic early identification of weak signals within a SEW framework.
Tactical Intelligence
Tactical Intelligence: the focus is on providing information designed to improve shorter-term decisions, most often related with the intent of growing market share or revenues. Generally, the type of information that you would need to support the sales process in an organization. Investigates various aspects of a product/product line marketing: • Product - what are people selling? • Price - what price are they charging? • Promotion - what activities are they conducting for promoting this product? • Place - where are they selling this product? • Other - sales force structure, clinical trial design, technical issues, etc.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence has two forms. In its narrower (contemporary) form it has more of an information technology and internal focus than competitive intelligence while it broader (historical) definition is actually more encompassing than the contemporary practice of CI.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management (KM), when it isn't properly achieved (it needs an appropriate taxonomy for being up the best standards in the domain), is also viewed as being a heavily information technology driven organizational practice, that relies on data mining, corporate intranets, and mapping organizational assets, among other things, in order to make it accessible to organizational members for decision making. The CI shares some aspects of the real KM that is ideally and definitely human intelligence and experiences-based for more sophisticated qualitative analysis, creativity, prospective views. KM is essential for effective innovations.
Market Intelligence
Market intelligence (MI) is industry-targeted intelligence that is developed on real-time (i.e., dynamic) aspects of competitive events taking place among the 4Ps of the marketing mix (i.e., pricing, place, promotion, and product) in the product or service marketplace in order to better understand the attractiveness of the market. A time-based competitive tactic, MI insights are used by marketing and sales managers to hone their marketing efforts so as to more quickly respond to consumers in a fast-moving, vertical (i.e., industry) marketplace. Craig Fleisher suggests it is not distributed as widely as some forms of CI, which are distributed to other (non-marketing) decision-makers as well. Market intelligence also has a shorter-term time horizon than many other intelligence areas and is usually measured in days, weeks, or, in some slower-moving industries, a handful of months.
Market Research
Marketing research is a tactical, methods-driven field that consists mainly of neutral primary research that draws on customer data in the form of beliefs and perceptions as gathered through surveys or focus groups, and is analyzed through the application of statistical research techniques.In contrast, CI typically draws on a wider variety (i.e., both primary and secondary) of sources, from a wider range of stakeholders (e.g., suppliers, competitors, distributors, substitutes, media, and so on), and seeks not just to answer existing questions but also to raise new ones and to guide action
