A good competitive defense includes a good offense. A competitive intelligence program can be crucial in increasing market share and outsmarting competition. Systematic competitive analysis is, in fact, essential in helping a company survive, handle slow growth, cope with change, and improve decision making. Setting up an offensive program requires, first, clarifying corporate goals, establishing responsibilities, identifying staff roles in competitive intelligence, and organizing liaisons with line departments. It's also a good idea when developing a corporate intelligence program to combine in-house information collection with field investigations.
Interviews conducted in an ethical manner can add information important to various line departments.
Asking direct questions of a competitor's employees is one obvious way, and can be fruitful if the employees in question don't have training in competitive intelligence. Aside from direct inquiry, information on competitors comes from observation, facility visits, speeches by the competing executives, trade shows, exhibitions, trade publications, government data, reports from stock market analysts, and a competing company's own publications. Sophisticated use of libraries and the Internet also greatly aids in collecting competitive information. To use this raw information most effectively, it's necessary to put it in a framework. A company should think carefully about how to segment its markets into product, distribution, and customer categories.