“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” – American Marketing Association definition of Marketing

If you are an Apple fan, do you really care about their product development processes, the processors in their iPhone, the Unix roots of the Mac OS or the contractual arrangements between Apple and music industry players? Are things like their software testing techniques, documentation standards or even their clever advertising campaigns important? I doubt it.

If you are like me then you are more enamored with elegant products that bring you pleasure or utility in ways that are simple to grasp and use.

The benefits of using Apple products are always front and center. For instance, I can easily answer why using the AppStore for iPhone applications works for me. It solves a problem (avoiding complexity) while delivering value (thousands of free or inexpensive applications). Meanwhile the iPhone itself delivers on the promise of the mobile internet. Shockingly since so many other companies were trying to do the same thing for years, Apple got it right first. Well, maybe it is not so shocking. After all, Apple makes a habit of entering a market late but, and this is a big “but”, with superior understanding of the product and service characteristics which are prized by consumers.

For most of its history, Apple has mastered understanding consumers, translating their needs into hardware/software/service requirements and delivering a whole, satisfying experience. This is a marketing rather than a technology mindset.

This is exactly where (with exceptions, of course) that the Competitive Intelligence community fails to deliver.

We started this journey a couple of months ago. The goal has been to describe how to develop and deploy a new competitive intelligence function for your company. You might recall how the early articles tiptoed around the issues and people sensitivities to the new function. Later, I was more specific about tasks such as budgets, branding and assertively expanding the function. Boldness became the order of the day.

We talked about how many people will not understand what you are trying to accomplish. Some that do understand what you are attempting will be nervous and suspicious about your aims. Are you trying to supplant their role? Is your goal to implicitly criticize their performance? Why should they help you with their special knowledge? And, what is it about competitive intelligence that will help them?

All along the way we have discussed practical tips for the development and deployment. More than that, I have tried to illuminate people issues that are important with the thesis that these issues are the most intractable if not dealt with properly. All of the other issues of analysis techniques, infrastructure design, acquisition of tools and budget are simpler (though not trivial) issues if the people ones are aligned well.

And now we come to the final step.

The final step is to spread the word about competitive intelligence.

By its nature as a service, Competitive Intelligence is a requested activity. That is, a senior management sponsor asks a question about the competitive environment and the CI professional responds. Many experienced people will tell you to stick closely to your senior management sponsor. And that would be right. Nevertheless, there will come a time when you (as the CI professional) will have the professional confidence and organizational credibility to lead.

This is the time to go on the offense with competitive intelligence.

“Going on the offense” simply means that you will begin to proactively formulate activities, plans and recommendations that are congruent with everything that you have already done. Assuming that you have laid the foundation properly, you should have a sense of the opportunities and boundaries within the organization. More than that, you have established relationships that allow you to speculate about the effectiveness of company strategy. Multiple leaders will have noticed your contributions and it will not surprise them that you can do more.

There are three important ways to proceed.