To succeed in business and deliver results in highly competitive markets, you need timely and relevant intelligence. Decisions and planning should be based on data, and you need the perspective and insight gathered through market intelligence.
But staying on top of competitor movement can be challenging, and many companies struggle with creating an effective competitive intelligence process. This can leave the business at risk.
Competitive intelligence is the systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about your competitive environment. This practice goes beyond creating profiles of key competitors using static data, such as annual financials, employment statistics, and product features.
Unlike static profiles, continuous monitoring of competitors’ activities captures their movements in a dynamic market. This includes tracking companies’ investments in new technologies, market entries, product launches, capacity adjustments, partnership formation, acquisitions, and other significant developments.
An effective competitor intelligence process gives you relevant data that reveals each competitor’s strategic objectives and evolving tactics.
Public records provide a rich source for monitoring competitors. Valuable insights can be extracted daily from press releases, investor relations materials, local and international news, and public statements made by executives, as well as insight from industry experts. However, competitive intelligence becomes actionable only when it aligns with your company’s business goals and priorities.
To make intelligence, especially competitive intelligence, actionable, it needs to answer these key questions:
By answering these questions, businesses can translate competitive insights into strategic actions, ensuring they stay ahead in a changing marketplace.
With the new year, a fresh wave of political leaders with new policy priorities will take the stage on Capitol Hill. This shift brings both opportunities and challenges for companies, all set against a backdrop of economic uncertainty.
To navigate this landscape effectively, a robust competitive intelligence process should begin by exploring the possibilities in the marketplace for 2025.
Analysts from the Bonadio Group expect the new White House leadership to incentivize domestic manufacturing via tax breaks and other policy reforms.
Additionally, a joint survey by Manufacturing Dive and accounting firm Eide Bailly indicates that 93% of U.S. middle-market manufacturing executives foresee growth opportunities in 2025 driven by sustainability and smart manufacturing technologies.
Meanwhile, investors are optimistic about innovations in the North American market over the next 12 months, with particular emphasis on advancements in weight loss drugs, which are anticipated to boost labor productivity, according to UBS.
Other key trends involve companies reinforcing cybersecurity, investing in AI to address the skill gap, and leveraging automation to prevent a recurrence of the labor shortage experienced during the pandemic.
Despite reasons for optimism in many sectors, S&P analysts warn that 2025 will be a year of global market uncertainty, driven by geopolitical instability, trade tensions, supply chain challenges, tariffs and rising costs.
Retail technology expert John Rossman predicts that 2025 will be a “make-or-break year” for brands. Success will depend on the company’s ability to navigate inflation weariness among consumers while still investing in technologies that drive customer engagement and satisfaction.
On the sustainability front, experts hold varying opinions on how far the new White House administration might roll back environmental initiatives. Companies that have invested significantly in eco-friendly products should prepare for some level of impact.
In an inflationary economy, with further tariffs and cost surges in sight, it is tempting for business leaders to reactively cut operating costs and put competitive intelligence on the back burner. However, this often means sacrificing a competitive edge in the marketplace.
During 2020-2022, the last period of uncertainty, only 15% of the 2,700 companies observed by management consulting firm PWC outperformed their competitors in terms of sustainable growth and valuation.
According to PWC, these market leaders outperformed in solving the lifestyle or workflow challenges their customers experienced during the pandemic by investing in technologies that offered practical solutions. These companies also built resiliency in their business operations to minimize exposure to geopolitical changes and other disruptive market factors.
How do you ensure that your company is among the outperformers in an uncertain economy? If success results from opportunities meeting preparations, having an effective process for gathering and using competitive intelligence is the key to opportunity awareness and proactive preparedness.
As public records offer a plethora of insights into market competition, companies are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to help analyze vast amounts of disparate data. According to technology firm Crayon, 25% of competitive intelligence leaders currently use AI for their responsibilities, while 56% plan to start using AI in the near future.
Free AI tools are proliferating with big tech backing. These include systems like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in addition to many emerging suppliers. Many business leaders are eager to leverage AI for competitive intelligence, not realizing the risks and costs.
Calibrating and setting up AI tools to deliver accurate intelligence relevant to your company’s business drivers has hidden costs, and there are risks that the business assumes when using an untested and uncalibrated AI system to support competitive intelligence. The cost starts with setting up the AI and training it to your business needs. You need advanced expertise and an experienced team to get satisfactory and positive results. You need access to relevant and accurate data sources. You have to train the system to parse and curate the information, and align it with your current business workflows.
An uncalibrated AI system is prone to delivering untargeted and overly generic answers, making the information unactionable for business professionals. Moreover, free AI tools can be influenced by popular social media content that contains fake news, leading to inaccurate or outright dangerous conclusions.
While AI offers an exciting frontier in competitive intelligence, poor AI results can stem from low-quality input data and a large language model that does not align with your business needs. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in enterprise-grade calibration with trusted data, managed by a team of skilled professionals committed to continuous improvement.
At Industry Intelligence Inc, we take pride in our 25 years of history serving enterprise clients across a wide range of industries. Since opening for business in 2000, our formula has been Technology + Human Expertise. Today, this formula translates to AI-enabled competitive intelligence that continuously adapts to our clients’ changing needs.
In addition to leveraging over two decades of industry knowledge in AI training, our team customizes market intelligence delivery to align with your company’s organizational structures and business drivers.
Our MS Teams integration facilitates company-wide alignment, allowing employees to engage in active discussions around market events as they take place. This implementation enables your team members to successfully combine real-time competitive intelligence with their own field insights. Through spontaneous group chats, your team can assess competitors’ strengths and weaknesses while aligning on threats and opportunities.
Want to know more about Competitive/Edge, our customizable, AI-enabled competitive intelligence service? Explore here, or reach out to us for a consultative demo at Info@industryintel.com.