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There are many reasons
why you might want to gather competitive intelligence about one of your
competitors. Competitive intelligence gives you hard facts on which to base
decisions about marketing tactics, R&D investments, product launches and
overall business strategy. Effective gathering of competitive intelligence
can easily be done using legal and ethical sources of information.There
are many ways to collect the information you need. You could:
- buy a competitor's
product;
- hire their employees;
- visit their booth
at trade shows and conferences;
- talk to their vendors;
or
- use publicly available
data.
Public data sources include
permit filings (building permits, environmental reports, SEC reports), newspapers
and magazines, and on-line sources. In this article we will focus on the
online sourcesOnline Sources Online sources of competitive intelligence
information include company websites, online versions of publications, search
sites, and monitoring services. Company Web Sites Company web sites are
one of the best sources of basic information about a company. On a company's
web site you usually find some general information about the company. It
is commonly found through an "about" or "info" link off the home page. Many
company's have information about key executives on their web site. There
also will be information about their products, services and pricing. Almost
all company web sites include information about where they are located and
how to contact them. Online Publications Many magazines and newspapers have
online versions that they publish on the Internet. Although some restrict
all or part of their content to subscribers, most have at least some free
content. Generally these sites have a search capability. You enter the name
of the company or person about which you would like information and the
site will search its archives for related information. Monitoring Services
Monitoring services will track a company or industry you select for news.
You can arrange with these sites, for a fee, to keep track of a number of
companies and industries and notify you whenever news about them is published
on the Internet. In addition, many of these sites let you manually search
their databases for information about your target company.
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