© 2019 All Rights Reserved
© 2019 All Rights Reserved
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About Cookies OKWhat is Competitive Intelligence
This is an extract from a lecture we gave to MBAs, business school students & graduates at the University of Westminster in London. Watch for a taste or click here for the full lecture.
We’ve done many other presentations including Zoom / online presentations and webinars. You can view more on our Videos / Webinars page which includes a 2024 talk on how AI (artificial intelligence) can be used to support competitive intelligence.
Contact us if you would also like us to talk to your employees or students on any aspect of competitive or marketing intelligence.
Businesses (and people) over time develop habits and patterns of working. Sometimes these lead to success. However often they stop management from seeing reality – especially when the business environment changes. Competitive intelligence can identify these business blindspots – both in the company itself, and in its competitors. Taking advantage of competitor blindspots is a major way that a company can beat its competitors, so it is crucial to understand one’s own blindspots so as to protect oneself from possible attack.
Business problems can be shown through humour. Humour allows businesses to take a step back and see a problem applied to a situation that appears different to their own. One can also sometimes see similar behaviour in one’s own organisation – thus highlighting a possible blindspot. Humour is just one technique for showing blindspots. Others include the use of drama workshops and story-telling, or war-gaming where the business environment is modelled and management try and take an external look at themselves and their competitive situation.
The following “stories” and office “theories” are taken from our humour database – with a random selection shown. Refresh the page for further examples.
It is always an idea to keep things simple - as expressed by the abbreviation KISS.
There are a number of explanations for what KISS stands for.
Take your pick 😉
Of the five options, the last one is dangerous if used by a company to describe their sales process and view of customers. This is a typical business blindspot i.e. the customer is too stupid to assess what is really going on. The others are almost the reverse - in that they emphasise the importance of keeping things plain and simple, rather than hide behind complexity - another business blindspot!
A key competitive intelligence skill is the ability to distinguish what you do know from what you don't know. The effort is then to find out sources for the unknown information. Unfortunately even with the knowledge there can be problems. Lewis Branscomb - the US physicist and Harvard management professor once said:
People rarely distinguish among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. But they are as different from each other and as interlocking as starch molecules, flour, bread, and the flavorful memory of a superb morning croissant.
The aim of competitive & marketing intelligence is to turn data into something that can lead to competitive advantage in the same way that bread depends on flour and water interacting to make something that is more than just a mixture of the raw ingredients.
