What, Why, How, Who, Where: Competitive Intelligence

Leveraging competitive intelligence can be the difference between a big win and a lost opportunity, both at strategic and tactical levels.

But for many organizations, insights derived from competitor analysis are under-used or (worse) don’t even make it to the people who need them most.

Today, we’re going to be exploring the what, why, how, who, and where of a successful approach to competitive intelligence with some help from Evelyn Castillo, Solution Strategist at Brandwatch. Castillo works with high profile clients to help them find answers to their big strategic questions.

Let’s dive in.

What is competitive intelligence?

In its purest form, competitive intelligence is the output of an organization’s analysis around its market or landscape, its competitors, or its competing products or services.

While the gathering of this information is critical, the magic happens when we analyze that data and put those insights to use.

“What I talk to our clients about a lot is highlighting the intelligence aspect of competitor intelligence – it’s not just about knowing what’s out there, tracking volumes, and comparing yourself. What’s important is what you learn from it, how that informs action, and how those actions fit with the objectives of your organization.” – Evelyn Castillo, Solution Strategist at Brandwatch

Why does competitive intelligence matter?

Competitive intelligence is about more than the share of voice your company has online in relation to others. Those metrics are a starting point, but you’ve got to dig deeper to get to the good stuff.

To get to the insights that matter, all competitor analysis should relate to your business goals. For example, say you want to be seen as a sustainable company within your market. You’d dive into competitive intelligence data with this in mind and ask questions like:

• Which of our competitors are seen as sustainable?
• What are the perceptions around those competitor brands, and how do they compare to us?
• And finally, how can we take the great things that are working for our competitors and step them up a notch while leveraging our unique value proposition?

When you start asking these questions, paths of action tend to light up.

The bottom line here is that competitive intelligence can help you find pathways to business wins, not just share of voice charts.

How should you approach competitive intelligence in practice?

The truth is that many teams are obsessed with looking at what their competitors are up to, but not for the right reasons. “One thing I learned early in my career that I found super-surprising is that people would spend a lot of time tracking their competitors,” says Castillo.

The problem she saw was that the information gained from looking at what competitors were doing wasn’t used properly. Teams were tempted to copy competitors, even if those actions made little sense for their own businesses. Successful competitive intelligence initiatives don’t start with tactical questions. They start with the objectives of the company, around which research questions can be built.

If an organization’s goal is to be seen as sustainable, comparing marketing efforts with those of unsustainable ‘competitors’ might not be the best place to start.

Brandwatch recently released a digital consumer intelligence in practice guide to competitor analysis. Here are some examples from it on how to approach competitor intelligence in the field.

1) Tips for performing a competitive landscape analysis

“Something that not enough clients do when looking at the competitive landscape is analysis within the category that’s unbranded, especially in order to discover new brands. I feel like people really underestimate new entrants to the market,” says Castillo.

She gives the example of the feminine care category. “If you’re losing market share in feminine products you might think ‘Oh, have people moved to tampons? What’s happening?’. The reality is there have been these new entrants to the market with products like sustainable cups, but if you were just looking at your competitors you’d be making assumptions about what was driving that decline in consumption. You’ve got to take a step back when doing a landscape report to get that discovery aspect.”

2) The importance of historical data

For Castillo, historical data is key to any kind of benchmarking a brand undertakes.

“Historical data is the best way to track shifts in behavior and assumptions. And whether you’re comparing yourself to your competitors, or whether you’re comparing yourself from now to some time in the past, or both, benchmarking is a big advantage,” she explains. “Being able to say Brand A was owning this space once upon a time and now they’ve shifted, that inspires curiosity. Why are they shifting? Why have perceptions changed? What have they done to make that happen?”

Castillo also talks about the importance of looking to brands that aren’t necessarily direct competitors but that have achieved things your brand is aiming for.

“Something we’ve done with clients before is to look at aspirational brands. If you want to make a change, instead of looking at competitors let’s look at those who have done what you want to do successfully. Let’s look back in time and see what we can replicate to our advantage.”

With Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can track public online conversations about any brand or topic all the way back to 2010.

3) A great way to visualize competitor benchmarking

Benchmarking is such a common use case for Brandwatch customers that we created visualizations specifically for the job.

However you want to break the data down, you can see how it’s changed over time.

For example, you could see how online emotion around one of your products has changed from one month to another.

Or you could also look at how much online conversation your brand has generated about a particular topic compared to a key competitor over time.

Whatever you want to measure, you can visualize it easily with the benchmarking component in Brandwatch Consumer Research.

Who needs to receive insights on the competition?

You might find that the people knocking on your door for this kind of insight are from the brand or social teams. But here’s the thing: research should never exist in a silo.

By going beyond vanity metrics like likes and mention volumes, the analyst can tackle the big questions that are important to the wider business. These insights can be relayed to executives and acted upon across the relevant teams.

The more business-wide wins analyst teams can influence with helpful competitive insights, the bigger the seat they’ll have at the top table.

Where do you go from here?

If you want to leverage competitive intelligence to its highest potential, you need to start with the fundamentals.

What are the company objectives this quarter or this year? From there, think about the research questions that’ll get the most out of your competitor analysis and that’ll have the biggest impact. Then you can get analyzing and distributing the insights.

Want to learn how to level up your competitor analysis? Download Brandwatch’s free guide to find out how it works in practice for high performing teams.