Antitrust: Ethical Use of Competitive Intelligence

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(quick, bouncy music) Competitive intelligence is a legal business practice of gathering and analyzing information about your market and industry. Let's discuss both the ethical and unethical ways to use it. One of the benefits of competitive intelligence is that it gives your organization information about where it stands in the market that you can use to make better business decisions. This information can influence a wide variety of business decisions including: finding untapped markets to expand to, reaching an overlooked audience in a current market, or pulling out of markets that aren't doing well. The information needed for competitive intelligence can be found in many ways and in many places. These can include the websites of your competitors, comments from customers on support threads or reviews, news mentions such as press releases, content posted on social media, and even visiting the competitor's location. There is a lot of publicly available information that can be used for competitive intelligence, you just have to look for it. Competitive intelligence can be used to make many business decisions including: launching a new product, entering a new market, creating more effective marketing plans, or retaining important clients. You need to be aware that gathering competitive intelligence can easily be confused with corporate espionage, and while some activities may not be illegal, they may be unethical. For example, pretending to be a customer to gain information about a competitor may not be illegal, but it can be viewed as unethical. This can result in serious reputational damage to your organization. If you want to remain anonymous while gathering competitive intelligence, you may want to hire a consultant. There is a difference between gathering competitive intelligence and corporate espionage. Corporate espionage involves breaking laws to obtain information. This can include bribing, spying, or bugging a competitor's office. This can also include theft of trade secrets. Sharing competitive intelligence with another organization may be considered a violation of antitrust laws, especially if there are confidentiality agreements in place. Competitive intelligence is research based and does not break laws. When you are gathering the information for competitive intelligence, it's important for you to keep all the data in one location. You can organize the data in the location you choose and even create profiles for each competitor. This way intelligence will be easy to locate when it is needed. Once you have gathered the information, you should analyze it to compare your organization to the competition. Now, this shouldn't be done just once. This should be done on a continuous basis. When things change in the market, go back and analyze the competitive intelligence again.