A Guide to Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering information about your direct and indirect competitors, as well as your overall market landscape. Competitive intelligence is an important component of making strategic decisions because it gives you insight into what your competition is doing, the trends and threats of your industry, and what your customers are looking for. A robust process for competitive intelligence can give you insight into making long- and short-term decisions about where your company is headed. 

Read on to explore how companies use competitive intelligence, what types of competitive intelligence are used, and how to gather competitive intelligence for your organization. 

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is gathering information to help you gain a strategic edge over your competition. Information about your competitors—such as their business practices, market share, and products—might be the first thing you think of when considering competitive intelligence. However, competitive intelligence can include intel about your company’s overall market, products, and customers.

Gathering competitive intelligence gives you the insight to make strategic business decisions and stay ahead of the competition by anticipating their moves and changes in the market. 

How is competitive intelligence used?

By gathering competitive intelligence, your company can make more strategic decisions to stand apart from the crowd and gain a competitive edge. Competitive intelligence provides recommendations that, depending on your industry, can help you make different decisions. For example, these insights could guide you toward designing a higher quality product than your rivals or reveal a service not currently offered in your market. Competitive intelligence helps you identify those areas where you can improve from the customer's standpoint, who has many choices every time they make a purchase. 

Globalization and increasing access to the internet worldwide lead to more competitive markets. When your customers can easily shop for similar products online, you have many competitors to be aware of. Competitive intelligence can help you organize and coordinate information gathering to be aware of trends as they arise and to stay on top of your competitor’s moves. 

Types of competitive intelligence

At first glance, competitive intelligence can seem like a lot of information to manage. With an organized approach and a suite of competitive intelligence tools, you can build an ethical CI process that uses best practices for the most accurate information. Two main types of competitive intelligence are strategic intelligence and tactical intelligence. 

Strategic intelligence

Strategic intelligence is long-term intelligence. This form of competitive intelligence looks ahead to the future and potential risks and opportunities. Strategic intelligence might include new and emerging technologies that have the potential to disrupt your industry or other large market changes on the horizon. Strategic intelligence helps you predict what will happen in the future and position your company accordingly. 

Tactical intelligence 

In some ways, tactical intelligence is the opposite of strategic intelligence. While strategic intel looks at the long term, tactical intelligence focuses on the immediate future, such as dealing with pressing issues this quarter or next. Tactical intelligence helps you gain the information you need to overcome a challenge or make quicker strategic decisions.

How to gather competitive intelligence

Your competitive intelligence efforts will typically go through four stages. First, you will collect the data and information you need. Second, you will analyze the data to draw conclusions. Third, you will communicate the information to senior leadership. Last, you will develop strategies based on your data. Consider each step of this process. 

1. Collect information

You will need to first understand your own company’s business goals and who your main competitors are. This can be a process unto itself, depending on the complexity of the market. Then, you will determine the information you need to discover and select the resources you’ll use, such as information from a company’s website, a competitor's pricing strategies and marketing tactics, or publicly available reports. 

2. Analyze

In this step, you will look closer at the information you’ve gathered and look for trends, opportunities, risks, and developments in your market. The goals will guide your research and the benchmarks you wish to achieve. The more information you consider, the better informed you will be. By keeping time and budget constraints in mind, your company goals will help you stay focused on the most important pieces to analyze. 

Competitive intelligence also gives important insight into what your competitors are doing. For example, if you notice indications your competitors are preparing to launch a new product, you can use this information to decide your launch dates and targets.

3. Communicate

Next, you will gather your findings into reports or use data visualization tools like graphs and charts to illustrate your data to senior leadership and other company stakeholders. You’ll need to clearly articulate your findings and their meaning to your colleagues and stakeholders to take appropriate actions. 

4. Strategize and take action

Using the information gathered, you will work with senior leadership and company decision-makers to create and implement strategic plans. This should include specific deliverables and actionable steps directly correlating with your findings. 

Competitive intelligence tools 

You can find competitive intelligence in a multitude of places. When researching a competitor, you can look at their online presence, such as their website, blog, or social media accounts. Not only can you learn information about the company’s products, positioning, and marketing strategy, but you can also learn key insights about audience engagement.

Industry resources can also help you gain valuable information for competitive analysis, such as industry report filings or publically available quarterly reports. Additionally, you can find various tools and software available to help you track competitive intelligence and gather it automatically, such as by tracking social media engagement.

Who uses competitive intelligence?

If you’re interested in working with competitive intelligence in your career, you have many options. Three careers to consider in competitive intelligence include strategic planning analyst, business research manager, and competitive intelligence analyst. 

Strategic planning analyst

Average annual salary (US): $92,146 [1]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 11 percent [2]

Education requirements: The most common education requirement for a strategic planning analyst is a bachelor’s degree, typically in business, finance, or marketing. 

As a strategic planning analyst, you will work with company stakeholders to define the company’s goals, conduct competitive intelligence research, and develop and implement strategic plans to achieve benchmarks. Some goals you may work toward include creating streamlined and efficient company processes, reducing costs, increasing sales, and earning more profit. 

Business research manager

Average annual salary (US): $120,005 [3]

Job outlook (projected growth from 2022 to 2032): 8 percent [4]

Education requirements: Research managers most commonly earn a bachelor’s degree, although a master’s degree is also commonly required, typically in business, marketing, psychology, or computer science. 

As a business research manager, you will design, conduct, and oversee research projects. This includes writing research proposals, determining the most appropriate methodologies, directly conducting research or supervising a team to collect data, and discussing your findings and recommendations with company leadership. 

Competitive intelligence analyst

Average annual salary (US): $91,213 [5]

Job outlook (from 2022 to 2032): 11 percent [2]

Education requirements: The most common degree for a competitive intelligence analyst is a bachelor’s degree, although many go on to earn master’s degrees. Common areas of study include business and marketing. 

As a competitive intelligence analyst, you will conduct competitive intelligence research to help companies make well-informed strategic decisions. In this role, you will look for market trends and new opportunities according to your company goals. A competitive intelligence analyst will make recommendations to senior leadership about the data they’ve gathered. 

Getting started in competitive intelligence with Coursera

Competitive intelligence is an important part of doing business in a competitive landscape. You will need to collect information, analyze your data, and communicate your findings to others at your company before creating a strategy based on your gained insight. 

If you want to learn more about a career in competitive intelligence, consider earning your Strategizing: Management for Global Competitive Advantage Specialization from Macquarie University on Coursera. This four-course Specialization takes about two months to complete and can help you learn skills in corporate strategy, supply chain, business model innovation, risk assessment, strategic thinking, and more.