You know what it is like to define and shepherd a product through the long process of development and then face the ultimate marketplace judgment about your efforts. There are so many times that you would pay handsomely for credible information that helped you decide on the right strategy, select the right market, position correctly versus your competitors and, of course, reach your revenue and profit goals. Good competitive intelligence addressees all of those questions.

Your job is to champion one or more products for your company. Each product needs to be successful in a marketplace crowded with existing competitors. New threats emerge over time that you have to anticipate and proactively manage. Development teams count on your guidance to build the product with the right features. Your general manager relies on you to help deliver the needed revenues and profits. All along the way, you have to understand the environment, explain your recommendations and justify the company’s investments for your product. This is not a job for the timid.

Competitive Intelligence Helps With the Challenges

“I don’t need the exact figure. Just give me the ballpark number.”

This is how I sometimes do business when I am trying to buy a new car. When I am early on in deciding which car to buy, knowing that one of the candidates is about $25,000 and the other one is about $40,000 is enough information for me. The ballpark number is a useful approximation for my initial purpose. (Later I will bargain about the exact car and sales price.)

In competitive intelligence, we are often asked to assign a number to something a competitor is doing.

For instance, our management might want to know how much research and development money has been spent on the latest product from our competitor. This isn’t a number that most companies will report publicly. So what do we do? Give up? No, rather we fall back on the article of competitive intelligence faith that there is always an ethical way to give a good answer.

A while back, I was softly singing a song when a teenager nearby overheard me. The song was one from the 70’s named “Signs“. The chorus is “Sign Sign everywhere a sign, Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind, Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign”. The teenager was amazed that I knew the song which mystified me. Then I found out that another group had remade the song in the last few years. The teenager (probably like I did when I was his age) assumed that everything is new. My experience is that few things are new but that many are rediscovered.

One thing that is true in competitive intelligence (CI) is that signs are everywhere. Contrary to the image of a spy sleuthing through trash or bugging phones, an ethical CI professional is swamped with publically available information. The question is rarely about the quantity of information but how to identify and interpret the valuable information.

For example, suppose you want to know if a company might be wanting extend a product line. Maybe they have a couple of products in the line which are not threatening to your business but any extension would begin to encroach into markets that you valued.

There are several things to do.

• First, make sure that you know all of their current products. Then, sort them into product lines. Create a timeline for each product line so that you know the rate of new product introductions.  Usually a company will make all of this information easily available on their website.

• Second, assign values to product lines. This can be a qualitative evaluation. The intent is to understand how important the product line is to the company.  Part of the valuation is also how important the product line is to you.

• Third, research how the company trademarks the product names. This is a straightforward exercise of querying the database at the US Patent & Trademark Office. Sometimes companies will trademark names in advance of the actual product introductions.

• Fourth, where intellectual property is involved, research the patent position of the company. It is often helpful to use a tool such as the one from Innography to organize and facilitate the search. The goal is to get indicators (“signs”) of where the company is investing its R&D resources since that often points to the types of new products that will be introduced.

• Fifth, look at the company’s partnerships and investments. Many times a company needs help to complete a product. Every time that they engage with another company, they are seeking some benefit. Tracking the relationships and the likely value of the relationship will give clues to the company’s future directions.

There are many more ways to see the signs. They are everywhere.