Marketing Intelligence and Competitive Advantage: The Real Challenge

Abstract

Competitive intelligence is often viewed by practitioners and the academia alike as an ethical and legal business practice, especially in today’s competitive environment where the survival of enterprises relies on their ability to not only analyze competitors but also to make the enterprise more competitive and better managed and qualified to deal with their entire environment and stakeholders. The current study aims at highlighting the driving forces of competitive intelligence, showing how businesses use competitive intelligence to pinpoint and recognize risks and opportunities in their markets, and to meet to market needs and challenges, which enable them to enhance marketing efficiency and productivity through a systematic decision making process. Unlike marketing research, competitive intelligence is a tool that uses the gathered information in actual situations in order to yield tangible results (solving real problems). Competitive intelligence experts and practitioners believe that if the intelligence gathered is not actionable, then it is not intelligence. The paper concludes that successful companies often use competitive intelligence as a practice to face business challenges and to cement their strengths and entities, and find solutions to the most problematic situations. Marketing intelligence may be effective in terms of market-oriented, customer-driven or related issues. Competitive intelligence, however, is more strategically oriented: it covers issues that extend beyond market borders, to include the entire business environment, both at the macro and micro levels