Competitive Intelligence: An Effective War-Game

To face the challenges of a highly dynamic and increasingly complex competitive environment and to take advantage of emerging opportunities, firms need to possess unprecedented capabilities in understanding and responding to competition. In fact, a firm’s success largely depends on its ability to quickly identify threats and opportunities, respond rapidly to changes in competitors’ strategies and improve the overall effectiveness of the planning process. For this purpose they have to develop detailed information about competitors’ characteristics, activities, costs and strategies. A thorough understanding of the competitive environment enables a marketer not only to identify, but also to act on opportunities. However, to achieve this objective, the information collected is not only to be collated but also the relevance and significance of its each piece needs to be interpreted and analysed. At the same time, firms have to recognise the fact that every competitor has virtually the same access to every information because of advanced technology. Therefore, the marketer’s success depends on his ability to make information work for him - the conversion of information into actionable intelligence. All companies, small or1arge, need to have some form of competitive intelligence activity to help them capture and leverage market knowledge to reduce decision uncertainty surrounding key competitive decisions. Unfortunately, no serious effort in this direction has been made in India in the past. Realising the significance of competitive intelligence, the author makes a modest attempt in this article, to expose the marketers to the nature and scope of this new war-game.