by Elton Gahr

Created on: March 14, 2011   Last Updated: March 16, 2011

Marketing a product is sometimes thought of as simply making people aware of a brand or product, but the truth is that it is rarely if ever that simple.  In nearly every case marketers are not simply making people aware of their product, but helping people to understand why it is better than those already available . This is why marketers have to use competitive intelligence to drive marketing effectiveness.

Competitive intelligence is at its most basic simply being aware of the competition that is in the same market. The difference between this and simple awareness of the competition is how the information is gathered. It is hardly surprising that with the amount of money spend on marketing that every possible advantage would be taken and while researching products before they are released and finding out their marketing strategies early may seem unfair in the biggest businesses it is still common.

One of the most common places for competitive intelligence is in the computer industry. This is largely because the speed of change makes getting ahead of the competition so important. One of the most common examples is discovering what the next piece of hardware a competitor is releasing will do. In this way a business can begin to advertise those places where they are better before the product is released as well as undervaluing those areas where they are failing. For example a competitor who knew the specs of the iPad two may have wanted to focus on the resolution of their screen while making it clear that a camera is unimportant. This can help a marketing company in huge numbers of ways.

This is not the only value though. Another important point is knowing what the competitive brand is going to focus on. Again looking at Apple as a simple example you can recognize that the focus of Apple is on style, simplicity and safety.  If their competitors knew that they were going to focus on these before they could attempt to counter all three of those before they happened. This could be worth millions to a company such as Microsoft who could counter those claims even before they were created.

Marketing is about information and controlling information. This makes the amount of information that a marketing company has vital to its ability to market and there is no doubt that the more information they have the better their ability to market the product.

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