Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

The single best source of information about finding and interpreting information about your competitors is the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Visit the site at https://www.scip.org and look at training and publications. I was a member for a few years, and found it to be one of the best professional associations I ever belonged to, and well worth the annual dues. But even if you don't join, you should be able to find just the reading material or short class you need.

Generally speaking, I think most companies (or marketers) focus too intently on competition and figuring out what others are doing. I don't mean that you should bury your head in the sand, but usually you're better off directing your resources (and efforts) to doing what YOU do as well as you can, learning more about what your customers are going to need, and testing your way to more effective marketing campaigns.

If you do all those things, and do them better/faster than your competition, you'll win. Time spent figuring out what competitors are doing is much less productive. What will you do with whatever you learn?

That said, I've found that a great source of competitive information can be amassed by just talking with customers, asking them for an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, and what they like/dislike about each of your competitors. If you do this in a structured way, and collect the information from a range of customers, you'll end up with great insights about what is going on in your marketplace -- including great competitive information.

Second choice: Hire an outside market research professional to get the answers to specific questions about your competitors. Just make sure you know what action you'll take once you have the results. If there's no specific indicated action, it's a waste of your time and money.

Forget tactics. Instead, create a strategy.

Tactics are short term elements. A strategy is a longer term plan. Forget the competition. Focus on yourself and on what you do best.

Hi marketgirl!

Great question....I have a process / book to recommend to really determine competitor tactics. The author is Jean-Jacques Lambin, eg in Market-Driven Management, Jean-Jacques Lambin, Ruben Chumpitaz and Isabelle Schuiling.

For my master's thesis, I followed his approach by interviewing each competitor to determine who they consider as competition, which information they track and how strong they can and would react. This allowed me to construct a decision tree: if we decrease our price by 10%, competitors 1 and 2 won't even be aware, competitor 3 will know but won't be able to do anything about it, competitor 4 will drop her price by 5%, competitor 5 will drop her price by 15%, etc.

Of course, my master's thesis is pre-Internet, so instead of interviews you may be able to get even better information easier online (as indicated by my colleagues above) to construct such decision tree

Good luck!

Have a look at the competitor analysis template at The Business Tools Store www.businesstoolsstore.com. It may help you with process and metrics.

Hi Marketgirl,
* The 'bible' of competitive intelligence is Michael' Porter's book, Competitive Strategy. It's been around a while, but the principles are still sound.
*Google 'Michael Porter five forces' and you'll see several links that lead to summaries of Michael's analysis, including a You Tube link to a interview with Michael.
*A couple other good books to shed light on competitive intelligence and what it looks like: Confidential by John Nolan and Super Searchers on Competitive Intelligence, a series of profiles compiled by Margaret Metcalf Carr.
*Check out SCIP (Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals), and look for these types of groups on LinkedIn (a great forum for dialogue with practitioners).
*Another approach would be to do a competitive analysis (product and/or market) in conjunction with a Lean/Kaizen initiative.
Good Luck!

Understanding the competitive landscape is a crucial part of an effective strategic plan. There are two types of competitive intelligence broadly defined as primary and secondary research. It sounds like you are conducting secondary research and hope to move into the primary research realm.

Primary competitive intelligence research is a specialized field of market research. The companies who do this kind of work will pose as potential customers, investors, or even professional recruiters to get executives to disclose information. So a CI researcher might call the marketing VP at your competitor and say they have a client who is looking for a new CEO. The marketing VP may tell them to beat sand, but often they will start bragging about what they have done, what they plan to do.

If the recruiting ploy doesn't work, the researcher may say they are calling to put together a company valuation for an investor conglomerate that is looking to buy high growth potential companies (for private firms), or is looking to take a larger ownership position (for public firms). Some of the new legislation makes disclosure for public firms more problematic, but it sounds like your competitors are probably still private. Executives at private companies know that buyouts mean big paydays so they are eager to share all of the great things their company is doing that ensures long-term revenue growth.

The most basic approach is to call posing as a potential customer and say "what makes you different or better than your competition?" Even getting the official company line from a salesperson on this question is often a useful indicator of how your competition sees themselves in your market space.