Competitive Intelligence - Distinguishing From Similar Fields

Distinguishing From Similar Fields

Competitive intelligence is often confused with, or viewed to overlap with related fields like environmental scanning, business intelligence, and marketing research. Fleisher questions whether the name "competitive intelligence" may not be inappropriate and compares and contrasts competitive intelligence to business intelligence, competitor intelligence, knowledge management, market intelligence, marketing research, and strategic intelligence.

Craig Fleisher suggests that business intelligence has two forms. Its narrower (contemporary) form is more focused on information technology and internal focus than CI while its broader (historical) definition is more encompassing than CI. Knowledge management (KM), when it isn't properly achieved (it needs an appropriate taxonomy for being up the best standards in the domain), is also viewed as being a heavily information technology driven organizational practice, that relies on data mining, corporate intranets, and mapping organizational assets, among other things, in order to make it accessible to organizational members for decision making. CI shares some aspects of the real KM that is ideally and definitely human intelligence and experience-based for more sophisticated qualitative analysis, creativity, prospective views. KM is essential for effective innovations.

Market intelligence (MI) is industry-targeted intelligence that is developed in real-time (i.e., dynamic) aspects of competitive events taking place among the 4Ps of the marketing mix (i.e., pricing, place, promotion, and product) in the product or service marketplace in order to better understand the attractiveness of the market. A time-based competitive tactic, MI insights are used by marketing and sales managers to hone their marketing efforts so as to more quickly respond to consumers in a fast-moving, vertical (i.e., industry) marketplace. Craig Fleisher suggests it is not distributed as widely as some forms of CI, which are distributed to other (non-marketing) decision-makers as well. Market intelligence also has a shorter-term time horizon than many other intelligence areas and is usually measured in days, weeks, or, in some slower-moving industries, a handful of months.

Marketing research is a tactical, methods-driven field that consists mainly of neutral primary research that draws on customer data in the form of beliefs and perceptions as gathered through surveys or focus groups, and is analyzed through the application of statistical research techniques. In contrast, CI typically draws on a wider variety (i.e., both primary and secondary) of sources, from a wider range of stakeholders (e.g., suppliers, competitors, distributors, substitutes, media, and so on), and seeks not just to answer existing questions but also to raise new ones and to guide action.

Ben Gilad and Jan Herring lay down a set of basic prerequisites that define the unique nature of CI and distinguish it from other information-rich disciplines such as market research or business development. They show that a common body of knowledge and a unique set of applied tools (Key Intelligence Topics, Business War Games, Blindspots analysis) make CI clearly different, and that while other sensory activities in the commercial firm focus on one category of players in the market (customers or suppliers or acquisition targets), CI is the only integrative discipline calling for a synthesis of the data on all High Impact Players (HIP).

More recently, Gilad focuses his delineation of CI more tightly on the difference between information and intelligence. According to Gilad, the commonality among many organizational sensory functions, whether called market research, business intelligence or market intelligence is that in practice they deliver facts and information, not intelligence. Intelligence, by Gilad, is a perspective on facts, not the facts themselves. Uniquely among other corporate functions, competitive intelligence has a specific perspective of external risks and opportunities to the firm’s overall performance, and as such it is part of an organization's risk management activity, not information activities.