When Jay Bloom leaves a trade show, his pockets are stuffed with
his competitors' brochures. When he reads trade journals, he
scans the pages for new products, promotions and other changes at
rival firms. A clipping service sends more articles containing
selected key words. If the customers who call his service center
mention competitors, he asks for details. Partners and investors
provide gossip about rivals. Employees patronize competitors to
investigate others' offers and service from a customer's
angle.
Bloom is no spy, merely a practitioner of competitive
intelligence, or CI. Keeping tabs on the competitive environment
helps the 32-year-old founder of Pet Assure Inc., a provider of
prepaid pet health plans in Dover, New Jersey, with everything from
marketing to acquisitions, explains Bloom.
"We want to know what our competitors are doing, what their
products are like and what their offers are," says Bloom. That
sounds sensible, but annual surveys by The Futures Group, a
Hartford, Connecticut, CI consulting firm, find that only about 60
percent of respondents have organized CI operations, and those are
mostly large companies.
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Small companies have a tendency to ignore competitive
intelligence, says John McGonagle, managing partner of the Helicon
Group, a CI consulting firm in Blandon, Pennsylvania. Entrepreneurs
are often strapped for time, of course, but arrogance also plays a
role. "Entrepreneurs tend to think they know all about their
competitive environment," McGonagle says. "They think
they're on top of things, but they aren't."
If you think you're on top of things, you may be--or you may
not be. To help you make the call, Entrepreneur examined Pet
Assure's CI activities and added McGonagle's expert
commentary for a case study on what it really means to know
who your competition is. The results reveal what one successful
entrepreneur does right when it comes to competitive intelligence,
how he could do better, and what other entrepreneurs can learn from
his experiences.
Mark Henricks is Entrepreneur's "Cutting Edge"
columnist.
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