Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external information that can affect your company's plans, decisions, and operations.

Who Are Your Competitors?

In order to truly understand how your company fits into the market, you need to understand which companies are your biggest competitors or who will be your biggest competitors in the future.

This means you will have to examine not only the present situation of your company, but also the future. So, when collecting information about your competition, focus on both the future and the present.

Here are some basic questions:

• What is your product or service?
• Which companies have similar products or services and how important are they in terms of competition?
• Can you determine what markets your competitors are targeting?
  • Are they the same as yours?
• Do you have any new products or services under development?
  • How about your competition?
• How is their company organized?
• Are they online?
  • How is their online presence?
  • Do they advertise online?
  • Do they have a recognizable name to your target market on the internet?
  • This information can tell you a lot about how much of a threat they are to you.

A key aspect to the competitive intelligence process is to understand your company well enough so you can better understand the information you need to gather about your competition.