Budding entrepreneurs have often heard the term competitive analysis during the course of preparing the launch of their business venture. The phrase or concept of competitive analysis or intelligence holds great value as far as building a strong business is concerned. Along with potentially useful market data and knowledge about the customers, a business also needs strong marketing strategy and planning to take over the target marketplace. Market research takes business owners numerous steps closer to building strong marketing strategy to advertise and sell their services or products.
Competitor Analysis and Market Research
Competitor intelligence or analysis is a crucial aspect of business analysis. It is the process of understanding the strategic movements of the actual competitors in the market. It involves crucial details about the processes like product management and marketing strategies like ad campaigns. This process is only legal when the information is gathered only through strict public sources. So far, internet is considered as the only, reliable and legal source of information for collecting such data. Marketing analysis and competitive research are differentiated based on their basic goal.
Market research revolves around finding basic problems in the marketplace and providing valuable solutions for the same. Competitive intelligence on the other hand is the value-added service offered by analysts researching your business. It helps collaboration of research, strategic planning and overall business development. This multitude of goal helps businesses to survive the fierce competition in the industry. It takes place on two strategic levels, namely, business and corporate. Both these strategies create competitive advantage based on your core competencies.
Marketing Strategy and Competitor Intelligence
The process of gathering this intelligence works in a cycle of five steps. These steps include:
- Project planning
- Researching and gather data
- Segregating storing the data
- Studying the existing data and producing the results
- Disseminating the data and deliver it to the concerned authorities
So, what does competitive intelligence draw that is so useful for strategizing? This aforementioned cycle brings forward essentially evaluated information. This information is valuable for the decision-makers in the system. These decision-makers are active participants of the planning and strategizing unit of a business. Disposing the competitive intelligence at the right end is very important, as it holds valuable information about the fellow members of the market, who excel to sell the similar products or services. Hence, this information becomes a handy organization tool for years to come.
The only concern here as far as the market research experts and the core team from the organizations working on the project is of maintaining ethical behavior. Strong laws of privacy and information leak should not be ignored while gathering essential data about the competitors. Breach of such legal considerations could harm the organization and marketing research firm for a long time.
