What Are the Functions of Competitive Intelligences in a Marketing Strategy?
Competitive intelligence is a specialist function within the broader field of market research. Competitive intelligence professionals monitor competitive activity, analyze the information and make recommendations that affect marketing strategy, product development and account planning. It plays an important role in strategic decision making by providing an early warning of competitive activity and a risk assessment of the likely impact on an organization.
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Monitoring
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Competitive intelligence is integral to the marketing and business development process, helping organizations build and maintain competitive advantage. The role of intelligence professionals is to monitor the business environment, explain the significance of past competitive actions and develop forecasts of future competitive developments.
Value
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Rapid change and the emergence of new competitors can influence an organization's success in the marketplace. Strategic decisions that rely on instinct or intuition are risky. The costs of wrong decisions can be high. A Nutrasweet executive calculated that competitive intelligence was worth $50 million per year to the company.
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Decisions
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Competitive intelligence helps to reduce the uncertainty in decisions about marketing strategy. By highlighting existing and potential threats, it can help executives make better-informed decisions about overall corporate strategy, marketing strategy, sales management, product development and investment strategy.
Account Planning
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As well as supporting high-level strategy, competitive intelligence is also valuable in planning sales activities for individual key accounts. Organizations faced with competitive threats to major customers can use competitive intelligence to assess the level of risk and take action to counter the competition.
Integration
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Although, originally, it was treated as a separate activity within the organization, competitive intelligence is now integrated with other related activities, such as market research and marketing strategy. This helps to align competitive intelligence with marketing strategy and, by integrating it within the corporate culture, helps to drive action based on intelligence recommendations.
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