ReThink Marketing

I met someone recently that is a successful marketing consultant. Her website has a graphic that asks the simple question:  Why do you need a marketing consultant? She goes on to give ten reasons why someone might be wise to engage with her to further their business. It all makes perfect sense and it prompts me to ask (and answer) a similar question for competitive intelligence. Why should someone bother with competitive intelligence? Why invest time, energy and resources to commission someone internally or externally to work on competitive intelligence? What reasons might make sense to someone that had to approve the budget?

There could be many reasons given. Many would be contextual. For example, in your firm, competitive intelligence might be important because of a person, a specific incident or the history of the company. Still, there are some very common and powerful reasons what any company would benefit from competitive intelligence.

Here are my top five reasons.

1. It overcomes isolation. By that, I mean that all companies operate in an environment that affects their success. In competitive situations, others are trying to take away customers, revenues and market share. Even in non-profit circles, other organizations are competing for attention, donations and awareness. There is simply too much information and influences to ignore. Competitive intelligence helps a company think about the environment.
2. It forces an external view. In my experience, most companies are drawn toward the operational issues. It seems as if there is an “attention magnet” that pulls (and then retains) the people toward an internal focus. Even though designated functions (think, marketing and sales) are charged with observing and interacting with the outside, how much more powerful it can be when the entire organization has some awareness of the customers, competitors and environment? Competitive intelligence, appropriately distributed and communicated in the organization, promotes a more balanced view of the world.
3. It organizes complexity. There is a natural urge for humans to seek simplicity. For people (never mind companies), the challenge is to sift through a myriad of everyday information to determine what is important and, then, what to do about it. For companies, many more factors must be considered. What models, frameworks and approaches help with this mind numbing complexity? Competitive intelligence provides analytical models to organize information, to present it effectively and to permit valuable interpretations.
4. It challenges assumptions. Nothing is more dangerous that unchallenged certainty. Even when something has been decided and is successful, the same decision may eventually lead to ruin when the competitive environment changes – which, of course, it always does. Many sacred ideas contain the germs of failure when they are not retested periodically for their appropriateness. Competitive intelligence gives ways to identify and methodically recheck the core assumptions driving a business.
5. It improves decisions. It is difficult to estimate how many decisions a company makes each day. Even though not all decisions are equally important, the cumulative impact of bad decisions is considerable. At the highest strategy levels, the impacts are amplified. When decision-makers have more relevant and timely information, it makes sense that they will make better decisions. Competitive intelligence provides such value to support decision-makers at all levels in a company.

There are many more reasons why a company should consider competitive intelligence. What would you add to this list?