4 Must-Dos for Competitive Insights in a Dynamic World
Date: August 3, 2023
Time Reading: 7 min.
By: The BlueOcean Team
For marketers, understanding your competitive landscape is the ultimate superpower. The more you know about your market, the better your ability to navigate your team through competitive terrain and strategize for success. In times when the marketing rallying cry seems to be: “Do more with less!” marketers who efficiently find and leverage competitive insights can create long-term, durable brand growth.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about competitors, market trends, and industry dynamics. It goes beyond a mere scan of the competitive landscape and aims to uncover valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making. When done right, a marketing organization that practices competitive intelligence with sophistication acquires an advantage that helps its brand gain ground against the competition.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is an important part of building a strong brand, helping you:
- Make well-informed strategic decisions
- Identify potential threats in your industry
- Benchmark against competitors and determine your strengths and weaknesses
- Closely monitor and predict competitor movements to respond
- Find untapped growth opportunities
Competitive insights are required to build strong brands
It’s well-documented that strong brands deliver financial success. To build strong brands, it’s critical to understand: Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
As Gordon Brown put it so well, “A brand name is nothing more or less than the sum of all the mental connections people have around it.” These mental connections are formed and influenced by what’s happening within your audience, your industry, and your competition. It follows that developing a winning brand strategy depends heavily on the strength of our competitive intelligence practice – how well we can gather, analyze, interpret, and action information about competitors, market trends, and industry dynamics
Traditional approaches have pitfalls in our evolving world
In today’s hyper-competitive and ever-changing business landscape, staying ahead of the competition can seem daunting. With the modern explosion of online behavior and data available to marketers, traditional methods for generating critical competitive insights are falling short.
Traditional methods have relied heavily on surveys, interviews, and focus groups. These methods are certainly important for capturing customer-first insights, but they’re also wrought with issues. They can take months to complete, are expensive to conduct and action, and include inherent bias – leaving much room for improvement.
Alternatively, some marketers turn to manual research through point solutions and assess insights from data acquired across siloed marketing channels. While this can improve the recency of the data and insights derived, stitching together insights across siloed data sources can leave blindspots that generate inaccurate or contradictory conclusions.
It's time for a new approach
AI technology presents an opportunity to overcome the challenges with traditional methods, empowering us with the ability to process and identify patterns from massive amounts of data. Through AI and automation technologies, data collection, ingestion, and transformation can take the time-consuming manual efforts out of the work of competitive intelligence, and allow for more holistic insight development.
4 Must-Dos to Ensure Your Competitive Intelligence Practice Supports Your Brand Strategy
When it comes to activating or enhancing a competitive intelligence practice within your marketing organization, keep the following checklist in mind to ensure those insights can effectively inform a strong brand strategy.
1. Go from isolated assessments to always-on monitoring
It’s important to remember, when it comes to seizing emerging opportunities, timing is everything. Having an always-on pulse on your market can help brands anticipate shifts, identify emerging opportunities, and position themselves for long-term success. For many brands, this will mean shifting toward data monitoring that’s more frequent than traditional brand trackers and even re-organizing team processes to enable more agility – allowing for more frequent actioning of data and insights.
2. Go from disparate data points to a more holistic analysis
Competitive intelligence isn’t just about monitoring direct competitors – it requires a more holistic view, from regulatory changes to global economics and news to trends in audience sentiment. Ingesting, transforming, and analyzing enough diverse data to create this view is only possible with the help of technology like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). AI can connect and synthesize data across all elements of competitor movements, at the volume required to generate meaningful insights.
3. Go from looking backward to predicting movements
A strong CI program is not solely focused on the present; it also involves predicting and anticipating competitors’ future actions. With the help of AI, marketers can use historical and present data to identify patterns at scale. This can enable brands to model potential returns from their marketing strategies and predict trends that help with more data-driven decisions.
4. Stay customer-centric, even as you focus on your competition
Brands should focus on bringing a competitive lens to understanding audience behaviors and preferences, rather than become overly fixated on competition alone. Audiences have to decide between your product, a set of competitors, or simply doing nothing at all. This reality underlines the importance of understanding customer behaviors and sentiments so that you can drive emotional connection and create relative differentiation that sets you apart.
In fact, according to a recent BlueOcean analysis, brands outperform their competitors when they have a stronger alignment of their messages to what their audiences care most about.
“The question is not who your competition is but what it is. And the answer is this: Your competition is any and every obstacle your customers encounter along their journeys to solving the human, high-level problems your company exists to solve.” – Tara-Nicholle Nelson (HBR).
The BlueOcean Advantage
BlueOcean ingests 3,000+ data points for your brand and your competitors to give you always-on insights into your brand’s relative performance and actionable insights that you can take to accelerate business impact.
We would love to support your competitive intelligence strategy with AI-powered insights that build your brand. Fill in the form below and we’ll reach out to chat more.
