The Truth of Competitor Intelligence

Since two thousand and five hundred years ago, Sun Tzu already told us how important to recognize the enemy besides ourself.

Completely, on his classic creation The Art of War, Sun Tzu said that if we know about our enemy and know about ourself too then we don’t even have to scared to face a hundreds battle. Meanwhile if we just knowing about ourself and not knowing about our enemy, we can win or loose. But, if we don’t know anything about the enemy and ourself than we will always been defeated.

Now then, Competitor Intelligence (CI) isn’t only valid on the military world. But in marketing, CI has a strategic part.
Marketer seems to be always trying so hard to concentrate on their own product development and ignoring all internal factors. Research about the competitors and customer, still being belief not so important because the marketer already sure about their product advantage.

Inward Looking Paradigm like this can’t be hold anymore because landscape external business changing doing so fast.

But we can’t act careless or anymeans to get any information about the competitors. CI that we must do is ilegal and ethical. This means not breaking any rules of it.

Lot of way and source that legal and ethical that can be used to get more information about our competitors. Source information that very easy and fast to get, what else if not the Internet. We just can do googling about our competitors.

Besides competitors company sites, information can be getting from Massa media sites, research cooper sites, millis or blog.

We can use another applications that in the internet to check on the information about our competitors. One of them is a google reader that can see new information about the sites that we already decided. This of course will minimize the time we have because we don’t have to browsing again to another sites.

It is, in this competition on new wave marketing era is more complex and brutally. The Driving force again, it is the Technology. On the new wave landscapet that more transparant, we can be faster and easier to get information about our competitors. On the opposite, our competitors can do the same thing on us.