article thumbnail

Companies Collect Competitive Intelligence, but Don’t Use It

Harvard Business Review

The second requirement is to anticipate response to your competitive moves so that they are not derailed by unexpected reactions. The paradox is that companies spend millions acquiring competitive or market “intelligence” from armies of vendors and deploy the latest technology disseminating the information internally.

article thumbnail

How to Actually Put Your Marketing Data to Use

Harvard Business Review

In most companies, marketers are in charge of assessing the competition. Because of this, close to 60 percent of all competitive intelligence professionals report to marketing. Yet the majority of marketers fail to use their competition analysts strategically, instead using them to gather more “recon” data.