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“Competitive Intelligence” Shouldn’t Just Be About Your Competitors

Harvard Business Review

For the next year, Jessica Eliasi, then the director of Competitive Intelligence at Mars Chocolate, travelled the world running “competitive simulation” games with local market teams from Russia to Mexico to Turkey to England. Simply and clearly put, CI is a perspective on changing market conditions.

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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. This “island mentality” is surprisingly prevalent among talented, seasoned managers. Some estimate the market for market research alone at $20 billion annually.

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How Competitive Intelligence Rules Encourage Cheating

Harvard Business Review

Yet when it comes to lower-level employees responsible for gathering competitive intelligence, those same lawyers impose Draconian rules that prevent employees from speaking with a competitor directly, or even engaging a third party to speak with a competitor on their behalf. Respondents from the U.S. Are the alarm bells ringing yet?

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Are Apple’s Patent Wars a Marketing Strategy?

Harvard Business Review

Often, managers think about patent litigation as a “narrow” strategy to protect a particular technology against a specific infringer. Plenty of management books describe patent litigation in such a narrow way: you file a suit to recover damages from someone who is copying you.

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Keeping Tabs on the Competition as a Start-Up

Harvard Business Review

Big companies have it easy when it comes to gathering and utilizing competitive intelligence. They have a defined brand and a fairly clear picture of market penetration, differentiators, and existing products and services. It can also help you outflank savvy competitors and acquire more market share. Note the geography.

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Get More from Your Event Spending

Harvard Business Review

Event marketing is currently a very expensive and sloppy process in most firms because the relevant information is fragmented, difficult to assemble, and the “database” is often a pile of business cards. ” But it’s far from moneyball when it comes to event marketing. But it needn’t be that way.

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You Can Make Your Sales Data a Lot Better with a Little Discipline

Harvard Business Review

Whether it’s the customer relationship management platforms used by sales teams, enterprise resource planning software used by purchasing teams, or the account-based marketing technology employed by marketing teams, the business intelligence platform can recognize a unique URL and attach it to clean, usable data.