Competitive Intelligence

In our blogs, Jeroen and I talked about ethical intelligence gathering. We’ve discussed this topic from the organization point of view. I recently came across a news item which made me think about another point of view: the perspective of the one(s) the intelligence is gathered about.

Companies investing in marketing undoubtedly have plenty reasons to launch the marketing campaigns that they do. But most of the time it’s hard to predict (let alone calculate) what the campaign will bring the company, and if it will pay itself back. And even afterwards it is not always easy to measure, or determine otherwise, whether or not the campaign had the desired effect. In this post I’d like to discuss how CI can contribute to determining how effective your marketing efforts really are.

Competitive Intelligence still seems to have a branding problem. A lot of people still don’t know what exactly CI is; sometimes they just had nothing to do with it until now, but most of the times they don’t even realize that they are already doing it, or parts of it. We’ve spoken about the definition in several posts already, so I will not go there again. Instead, I’d like to discuss some (somewhat) related professions or activities where (parts of) Competitive Intelligence can be applied, the first of which is reputation management.

In her previous post, Anne discussed the role of CI analysts. In this follow-up post I’d like to discuss their raison d’être. Is the human brain replaceable in the competitive intelligence process? Can it be fully automated at some point in time, using processor power instead of brain power?

In our previous blogs, we have been constantly saying that analyzing will remain human work and that the CI analyst is of vital importance. But what does the typical CI analyst do? What makes him or her valuable? What is that piece of human work we don’t want to (or can) automate in CI tools? I will discuss these questions in this weblog.

Recently I visited a BI-seminar where I exhibited on Competitive Intelligence basics. Afterwards I spoke to several people who wanted to discuss whether or not Competitive Intelligence would do them any good. Especially government or semi-government employees struggled with the necessity of CI in their particular situation. “We don’t have competitors” was one of the most heard phrases. Most likely that isn’t even true, but even if it is, I’d like to quote Seena Sharp here from her excellent book “Competitive Intelligence Advantage” where she explains the difference between competitor and competitive intelligence:

Every project always has to start with a business case. And every time it all boils down to the same ingredients. No – building a CI business case is not easy. The same goes for BI for instance, but at least the benefits of a BI system are a lot easier to measure afterwards. In this article I’ll discuss the CI business case and I would love to hear your comments and experience on this.

It has been a while since I read an article as stunning as this one – ‘James Bond’ Tactics Help Companies Spy on Each Other. The article is about a former CIA agent who is now some sort of private investigator who gathers intelligence on companies for his customers – mostly a direct competitor to the company he spies on. The nature of his way of working is so strikingly blunt and inappopriate that I’m not even sure whether this article should amuse me or have me deeply worried. I’ll try to explain in below post what exactly it is that startled me and then I’d encourage you to comment on how you feel about this.

In our latest post we’ve discussed briefly the questions about the accuracy of sentiment analysis. Are the current sentiment analysis techniques accurate enough? Are humans 100% accurate in performing sentiment analysis? In this follow-up post I would like to discuss these questions more thoroughly. While discussing this, I will refer to a number of blog posts in which the accuracy of sentiment analysis is discussed.

You have launched a new product onto the market, and of course you want to know how your customers feel about it. Are they happy about it? Disappointed? Or maybe you want to know how your customers (and other people) feel about your company in general? It is difficult to find reliable answers to these sorts of questions. Companies spend thousands on market research reports, only to obtain information from about a year old. What if you want to know how your customers feel now, at this very moment? The answer is sentiment analysis.