Home About Services Blog TOC References Contact
Oct
01

A Competitive Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing

Tom Hawes Competitive Intelligence, Strategy Effectiveness 2009-10-01

TelescopeEveryone else is working on the current products and the near-term tasks. Meanwhile, you are responsible for what comes next. Your focus is the next wave of products and the technologies that they require. You are monitoring key standards bodies, investments made by competitors and shifting loyalties of the key customers. There is pressure to make sure that the company is preparing correctly for this future. Your job depends on making the right calls and convincing busy people that you are right.

The bulk of the organization focuses on tactics. There is urgency in their actions. Near-term competition and priorities consume most of management’s attention. The last thing that most want is to be distracted with thinking about the future, especially when it might negatively affect what they are doing today. Your job, however, is to convince these busy people to change because of what is coming. They need to be convinced to balance what is pressing today with what is necessary to prepare for the future.

Few have the right combination of skill, motivation and shear persistence to do this job well. Here is what you must accomplish and how Competitive Intelligence helps with those challenges.

  • Understand the market direction. It not only what is currently happening that matters, it is what is going to happen. Competitors are entering and leaving the market. The forces which affect pricing power are changing. Trends of all sorts affect how well your strategies work. If commodization is looming, that means one thing. If disruption is likely, that means another. Competitive Intelligence monitors market dynamics and specifically tracks how known and merging competitors affect those dynamics.
  • Characterize the competitor strategies. No important competitor is passive. Dedicated people are working to shape the future in their favor rather than yours. They are implementing strategies to beat you and thwart your own efforts. You need to know what they are doing and what it means to your strategies. Competitive Intelligence allows you to “know” these competitors intimately by understanding their culture, processes and people.
  • Define the product lines. The long term vision of where your company needs to go concerns your senior management. Decisions about resource allocations, R&D investments, M&A and so on are derived from the products that must be developed for future competitiveness. Competitive Intelligence builds projected product roadmaps for competitors and allows you to compare, segment by segment, their likely future products to yours.
  • Create the strategies. Analysis only prepares you for the critical decisions about how to position your company in concrete terms for long-term success. At some point, you have to propose the right strategy. You must understand future scenarios, forecast competitor actions and align people in the organization. Competitive Intelligence explains future scenarios based on industry patterns, competitor strategies and market trends giving a context for future strategies.
  • Justify investments. Once you create and propose a strategy, the work of convincing others begins. The internal measure of success is how well you secure money to implement the strategies. There will be debate and disagreement. Your assumptions and judgment will be questions. Many will test your credibility to determine if they should support your strategy. Competitive Intelligence helps you accumulate hard and soft information, define a coherent strategy story and explain risks convincingly.

Competitive intelligence can help you do a better job at strategic marketing. It helps you create better strategies and get them accepted more effectively. More than that, it links the future to the present and helps all of the people that are thinking tactically to make (some) changes to support the future.

Signature Line

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
No votes yet.
Please wait...
business strategy, Competitive Intelligence, gap analysis, Strategy Effectiveness
Address: https://blog.jthawes.com/2009/10/01/a-competitive-intelligence-note-to-strategic-marketing/
« Shameless Self Promotion
A Competitive Intelligence Note to a CEO »
Trackback

4 comments until now

  1. Tweets that mention Strategically Thinking » A Competitive Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing -- Topsy.com @ 2009-10-01 11:04

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Fred Wergeles. Fred Wergeles said: RT @JTHawes: Published "A Competitive Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing" at http://tinyurl.com/yat8aoe. CI can help them. […]

  2. Avner Barnea @ 2009-10-04 12:17

    Executive that will peruse the above might assume wrongly that the CI actually is running the company! Let’s put things in the right proportion-CI is struggling to add its input in addition to the contribution by other executives that have a lot to say in each of these items from their ongoing monitoring of changes in the competitive area.

    No votes yet.
    Please wait...
  3. Tom Hawes @ 2009-10-04 13:15

    Avner,

    If CI was running the company, then they would be called the “CEO”. My assumption is that they are, as you say, contributors. My experience mirrors your comments in that many are monitoring the competitive environment including (hopefully) those in executive positions. In fact, one of the internal “competitors” to a formal CI function is often the ad hoc intelligence gathering of senior management. The challenge that I have observed is getting the ad hoc and the formal systems to work together well since, in my opinion, neither is sufficient alone.

    Nevertheless, which part of the post makes it appear that CI is running the company? All of it?

    My intent is to illustrate how Competitive Intelligence helps senior leaders with the strategic challenges but not intend to imply that the people charged with making the decisions should be replaced with CI. In this particular post, I have only dealt with the kinds of input that I think that CI contributes to someone with overall responsibility for Strategic Marketing.

    I have another blog entry at http://blog.jthawes.com/2009/06/02/the-prime-directive-of-competitive-intelligence/ that attempts to capture my perspective of what CI should contribute (in a broad manner) to decision makers.

    Thanks for your comment. Let me know if I have missed your meaning.

    — Tom

    No votes yet.
    Please wait...
  4. A Competitive Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing – courtesy of Tom Hawes « BLACK SWAN PROJECT @ 2009-10-06 00:51

    […] Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing – courtesy of Tom Hawes Check this post A Competitive Intelligence Note to Strategic Marketing from Strategically Thinking: Everyone else is working on the current products and the near-term […]

Add your comment now

  • Archives

    • November 2010 (1)
    • September 2010 (4)
    • August 2010 (1)
    • July 2010 (3)
    • June 2010 (1)
    • May 2010 (5)
    • April 2010 (5)
    • March 2010 (4)
    • February 2010 (4)
    • January 2010 (6)
    • December 2009 (2)
    • November 2009 (2)
    • October 2009 (7)
    • September 2009 (6)
    • August 2009 (11)
    • July 2009 (9)
    • June 2009 (12)
    • May 2009 (6)
    • April 2009 (4)
    • March 2009 (12)
    • February 2009 (5)
  • Categories

    • Competitive Intelligence (94)
    • Early Warning (6)
    • Maintenance (1)
    • Organizational Development (13)
    • Strategy Effectiveness (56)
  • Recent Posts

    • The Hard Sell – Strategy to an Experimenter
    • Can You Answer This Question?
    • Competitive Intelligence’s Just Do Its
    • You Know What It is Like When …
    • The Three Basic Competitive Intelligence Questions
  • Tag Cloud

    alignment analysis analytical techniques Apple business strategy case studies change Chris Zook CI techniques Competitive Intelligence competitive priorities consulting decision making Early Warning effective presentations failure signs future focus gap analysis HP integrity leaks management Marketing Michael Porter news people product marketing professional competence SCIP senior management SMB strategic imperatives strategy strategy;report card;vision;change artist Strategy Effectiveness strategy evaluation strategy implementation substitutes success measures survey SWOT tactics tools trademarks trap question
Strategically Thinking · coogee theme · 2008
RSS Feed · WordPress · TOP