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
Democratizing Market Research
I recently heard on NPR about an interesting book, The Man of Numbers, by Keith Devlin. Here’s a passage from the article about the book that caught my attention: “They recorded everything in good old Roman numerals and if they wanted calculations, they went down the...
iPad 2 Camera Netnography
Our netnography of the camera feature in the iPad 2 shows that consumers were looking forward to it and saw it as a reason to buy or upgrade. Unfortunately, once they got to use the cameras, many were disappointed with the feature because of the poor quality and...
Gender Ratio in Social Media Posts
At NetBase, we’ve begun studying the demographics of people who post on social media, and we’re excited about the promise of delivering new and valuable insights from this enhancement to our social media analysis. One of the first parameters we’re exploring is gender....