Competitive intelligence, or CI, encompasses the gathering, analysis, and use of data collected on your business competitors, their customers, or other competitive advantage contributing factors.

Also known as corporate intelligence, you are better placed with CI to understand the opportunities or challenges present in your competitive landscape. You can analyze information collected through intelligent but ethical means to create strategies that better align your business practices to the market.

In a nutshell, a competitively intelligent business makes effort towards gathering and analyzing data on its business environment, industry niche, competitors, and their products or services.

Doesn’t CI Sound Very Similar to Corporate Espionage?

Competitor information gathering and analysis will result in identifying competitive gaps in your market to develop pertinent strategies. Although this sounds suspiciously like corporate spying, no ethically questionable or illegal activities are used to uncover what your competition is leveraging on for their market share.

NetBase Quid uses legitimate, ethical means of research and data collection, such as scanning public records, databases, websites, and social media posts to build competitor data sets.

By using the resultant knowledge, you can improve your business decisions as part of your market intelligence plan. You’ll be kept up to speed with the moves that your competition is making within your market environment.

Our CI solutions also help you to assess and monitor your prospects, using published or unpublished sources. We furnish you with proactive data that identifies any competitive gaps in your market.

Types of NetBase Quid CI solution plans

Activities that can be summed up as competitive intelligence efforts are categorized into two groups, strategic and tactical.

Strategic intelligence focuses on key opportunities or risks that face an enterprise’s long term outlook of its market segment. Tactical intelligence, on the other hand, deals with the short term, seeking to offer input on revenue increase and capturing market share.

CI goes beyond scanning easily accessible information about your competitors, substantially more than what most companies can find.

NetBase Quid competitive intelligence studies involve collecting or analyzing data from disparate sources. This publicly accessible information acts as our starting point for comprehensive CI and include;

  • News media
  • Online data mining
  • Competitor or customer interviews
  • Conferences and trade shows
  • Industry expert insights
  • Public filings and government records

Other data sources that CI encompasses are investigating key distributors, stakeholders, customers, suppliers, and competition competitors.

Why Incorporate CI into Your Business Strategies

A structured, ethical, and disciplined format is used to provide you with marketplace insights on the dynamics or challenges of your competitive landscape. This is essential in the development of your strategies, be it for market penetration, product launches, or other strategic plans.

Using Netbase Quid CI solution packages, your business can take advantage of;

  • Incorporated data on the external market and competitive forces for your strategic planning
  • Strategically relevant information or generated insights from structured research and analysis
  • CI that enhances your finance, operations, and marketing strategies
  • Reduced decision risk and minimal uncertainty regarding competitor dynamics or market developments
  • Legal, ethical practices that conform to trade secret and antitrust laws alongside the corporate code of conduct

There’s no bigger proof of the importance of CI to your business than the creation of SCIP or the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals in 1972.

This non-profit body builds the infrastructure, advances collective analytical capacities, and shares research on decision support tools. The SCIP is composed of professionals across the business community including; industry experts, government, and academic stakeholders.

Conclusion

The key attribute of NetBase Quid’s competitive intelligence solutions is intelligence. We gather information either formally or formally with the use of experts and proprietary technology to assist your business with carefully collected and thoughtfully analyzed competitor data.

Using our resultant analysis enables your business to formulate metrics by which to strategize plans like expansion or market penetration decisions.