Competitive Intelligence: The Swiss Army Mindset for Strategic Growth
Written By: William Frackowiak
Businesses and organizations commonly use marketing intelligence, or competitive intelligence (CI), to attain strategic growth and outmaneuver the competition. From defining goals and revealing key insights to supporting savvy decisions for long-term success, CI is involved in numerous tangible aspects of running a profitable business. Further, CI services have continuously proven to be sought-after, indispensable tools for management teams across a myriad of industries.
If you are running your own business or employed by one looking to realize greater potential, you may be thinking about integrating a CI function into your overall marketing strategy. To dive into this topic, let’s first answer three essential questions:
How prevalent is CI?
What are the benefits of CI?
How difficult is it to integrate?
To answer these questions, we looked at the 2023 State of CI Report from Crayon, a leading CI solutions and software firm. Crayon has been compiling the industry’s longest-running authoritative report to shed light on these questions.
The Fact of the CI Matter
The 2023 State of CI Report published by Crayon shows that since 2021 there has been a 55 percent increase in respondents claiming CI products are “absolutely critical” to success and roughly a 25 percent increase in those thinking it is “important.” The report links these statistics to a related finding that CI functions can directly increase revenue by:
Refining differentiation
Building a brand
Winning deals
It’s no coincidence that a substantial portion of respondents planned to increase their CI budgets in 2023. The implication here is that decision-makers’ commitment to the growth of CI acts as insulation from turbulence in the overall economy that might decrease the demand for CI. Consider that, if the path ahead becomes less economically certain, CI can act as the torch, helping to light the way.
What Makes CI Increasingly Prevalent
The customizable nature of CI is amenable to the unique needs of management teams. In gathering requirements, CI practitioners work with management to define key performance indicators (KPIs) to analyze. The KPI generation phase is cut-to-fit and can focus on numerous subjects, such as competitor market share, new customers, and even talent acquisition. Broad categories of KPIs can include but are not limited to:
Strategic
Operational
Functional
Leading/Lagging
Individual KPIs, which usually focus on one dedicated metric each, fall under the broad categories. Some indicators can be overarching, providing operational snapshots of company-wide interests such as return on investment or overall profit margins. Conversely, other KPIs can be tailored to a particular group or function, such as monitoring engagement with social media or the time it takes to resolve IT tickets.
Another customizable feature of CI is that products can be delivered when and how management prefers. Seventy-one percent of respondents to Crayon have CI delivered in meetings, but E-mail, Slack, Teams, and dedicated CI platforms also share large portions of preferred delivery systems.
Since developments within and outside organizations don’t occur on a fixed schedule, decision-makers can acquire CI at varying rates. For example, eighty-eight percent of respondents to Crayon prefer weekly or monthly CI reports. In terms of Win/Loss analysis, twenty-nine percent of respondents desired ad-hoc reports. These frequencies of asking for CI speak to the previous finding of an increase in CI being crucial to success. Watershed moments can be unpredictable, but having a routine or as-needed analysis about the competition can be your first and best line of defense, which in turn, prepares the organization’s offense.
Stumbling Blocks to Effective CI
The quantifiable benefits and fluid aspects of CI are understandably attractive. But some lingering concerns might remain: What about the obstacles? What have respondents found difficult about implementing CI into their organizations?
Crayon’s 2023 report shows that attaining buy-in from management ranks low as an obstacle to overcome. Therefore, getting started with CI can be a relatively easy sell for your company. What seems to be the most difficult part about committing to a competitive or marketing intelligence function is the work of the analyst.
Crayon reports that the most challenging actions are collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence products. Ranked under these challenges are efforts to measure CI’s contributions and to keep a timely deliverable schedule. Acquiring the expertise of a dedicated CI or marketing firm to handle the labor-intensive aspects of analysis can provide the actionable boost to clear the next strategic obstacle.
CI Wrap-Up
What Crayon lays out for the present and future of CI is that having a grasp on these concepts is likely to strengthen the competitive nature of your organization. The benefits link directly to a heightened sensitivity of an organization to add Ws to the Win/Loss analysis, while at the same time likely not experiencing too much pushback from leadership. If the most difficult challenges of implementing CI are in the weeds of analysis, know that Ethos Copywriting is a full-service marketing firm capable of delivering customized insight to move the needle.
[i] Crayon. (2023). 2023 state of competitive intelligence: The industry’s largest & longest-running benchmark report. https://www.crayon.co/state-of-competitive-intelligence