What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is a key ingredient in a robust market intelligence strategy that aims to bolster marketing performance, increase sales and improve product strategy. It’s the systematic collection of data from a multitude of sources in the ongoing analysis of the competition
Competitive Intelligence helps you to stay up to date with your competitors and your market, and inform strategic business decisions. A thorough understanding of your competition’s strengths and weaknesses will enable you to fine tune your approach to your market and capture the attention of consumers and increase your brand’s share of voice.

What is “Competitive Intelligence” for?
The aim of competitive intelligence is to gain insight into your competition’s brands, products and consumer engagements to make informed decisions. Keeping your finger on the pulse of the competition coupled with consistent trend analysis puts your brand in position to take advantage of gaps in the market before anyone else notices.
Use competitive intelligence to:
- Conduct competitive analysis
- Drive new business pitches
- Measure brand perception and share of voice
- Map customer reviews
How to gain better results with Competitive Intelligence?
Everything from marketing, product development, influencer identification and investment strategy can benefit from a comprehensive understanding of your competition’s successes and missteps.
- Understand not only what otherbrands are getting right, but what they’re getting wrong as well.
- Insights into the competition are evolving 24/7 through social media and online news publications. This creates an absolute need for brands to keep tabs on the competition or fall behind
- Operate on the presumption that the competition is monitoring you. Therefore, you need to know as much as you can about your competition so you can put that information to work in everything you do.

Competitive Intelligence Resources
Ten Ways Restaurants Can Track Campaign Impact with Social
Let’s say you’re a restaurant operator and you’ve come up with a great creative concept for your ad campaign, executed it well, and placed it in all the right places to reach your target audience. So far so good. But now you want to know: How’s it doing? Is it raising...
@Pharrell, Can We Have Our Hat Back?
That’s Josh Martin, Social Media Manager for Arby’s, wearing his version of the hat Pharrell wore at the Grammys and Oscars. Watching the Grammys broadcast, Josh saw the similarity to Arby’s own logo hat, tweeted about it to Pharrell, and embarked on a campaign that...
How a Teenager Helped NetBase Understand Emoticons
Because social media is heavily used by teenagers, the online conversation is sometimes foreign to the likes of our staff of adult Ph.D. computational linguists. A particularly thorny problem is analyzing emoticons for sentiment. Some are obvious: a smiley face :-)...