Competitive Intelligence

What is competitive intelligence?   

Competitive intelligence (also competitor observation or competition monitoring) refers to the process of continuous reconnaissance of the market and the business industry environment to define your own market position and leadership.  

The CI Process involves the systematic collection and analysis of information on the competition, competitive products and services, the competitive landscape, and trends. You can use this as a basis for taking strategic and tactical decisions, and thus always be one step ahead of the competition. 

Regular market research and monitoring is often followed by a market or competitive analysis during which the collected data is interpreted and linked.  

Competitive intelligence as a pillar of corporate strategy  

How do you tackle your strategic planning and case studies? You probably monitor trends and market research of your own brand, which is a great start. It’s good if you also listen to feedback from your customers.  

But where do your competitors feature in this? Do you know how your competitors are moving in the market? Competition monitoring provides you opportunities you to avoid unpleasant surprises, to respond quickly and to modify your company’s strategy promptly.  

Why is strategic competition monitoring important?   

Successful competitive intelligence enables a company to uncover important information about the competitors, respond quickly and modify the company’s strategy promptly. Monitoring competitors also allows the company to improve business responsiveness, growth, and gain better knowledge of potential threats and come up with contingency plans to counter it. 

If done holistically, you can determine gaps in the market and strategically plan where your brand and message will be most successful and win against your competition.  

What are the advantages of strategic competition monitoring?  

Successful competitive intelligence enables you to uncover important information and gain valuable information for your corporate strategy. These include:  

• Understanding the market
• Focused targeting of customers
• Market forecasting
• Tracking Economic development
• Tracking competition's products
• Tracking competition's pricing/ analyzing its strategy
• Tracking competition's customer behavior 

By keeping an eye on your competitors, you can leverage key competitive advantages. Especially in times of digitization, when the market is fast-paced, and can change every quickly. 

What to monitor and evaluate in competitive intelligence 

To cover all important aspects of competition monitoring and media intelligence, you should base the business intelligence of your organization on up-to-date information from several valid sources, competitive landscape such as:  

• Records of individuals connected to the company
• Press information
• Entries in commercial registers
• Information from company databases  

Restricting market intelligence to searches in the freely accessible Internet is risky as the information there is often incomplete or inaccurate. You should always check the source of the information to confirm its validity.  

Additionally, once you access the data, you also need to evaluate the right metrics. Consider the following:  

• Where is the competition expanding or financial services of competitors?
• Which new products are developed?
• Which marketing and advertising activities are being rolled out?
• What attention do the media pay to the competition? 

These insights are of little use if you learn them at the wrong time. Automated and customized e-mail alerts ensure that you are always up to date and stay informed about new developments, so you never fall behind.  

How LexisNexis helps competitive intelligence 

Nexis Newsdesk^®, our flagship media intelligence solution, empowers you to comprehensively scour a plethora of content to aid your competitive intelligence efforts. It enables you to: 

• Create personalized news searches around topics of interest or competitors 
• Analyze brand awareness and marketing campaign results for you and your competition
• Monitor what people are saying about your company, your brand, and your competitors in near-real time so you can quickly respond to developments
• Track multiple topics across nearly 4 million articles daily, spanning 75 languages and more than 100 countries, for a comprehensive view of the media landscape
• Stay abreast of 24/7 broadcast-news coverage with monitoring of more than 2,000 TV and radio stations around the world and access to full-length transcripts and related videos
• Keep track of the buzz across social media, including Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, as well as thought-leader blogs, podcasts, microblogs, video/photo sharing sites, industry forums and more
• Convert your research into easy-to-digest charts and graphs to share news and insights within your organization
• Stay up to date on the latest news thanks to customized alerts and newsletters
• Share copyright-compliant news and information with colleagues and clients using customizable distribution tools, including branded newsletters and RSS feeds 

Nexis Newsdesk’s features include: 

A customizable dashboard 

• Branded alerts and newsletters
• Embeddable interactive charts
• Advanced analysis and filtering capabilities
• Personalized searches and alerts
• An unparalleled array of content 

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