A competitive landscape analysis has the potential to shock marketers with bad news. Here are five examples of things to look out for and how to respond.
What is competitive intelligence? A nuanced understanding of the marketplace in which you and your competitors are situated? Yes. Corporate espionage? No.
Your partner channel sees the world differently now. The cloud has changed everything. For partners today, it's adapt or die. Here are eight trends to know.
Will smartphones transform qualitative research methodology? Get an inside view from an expert who knows qual via smartphone inside and out.
In this episode of the B2B Market Research Podcast, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviews Over The Shoulder Co-Founder and President Ross McLean.
Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviews Derek van Bever, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School and coauthor of “Stall Points.”
The world is covered in the carcasses of failed market research firms. What led to this sea of whitewashed bones? Indecisiveness. Tough choices are needed, particularly on these six issues.
Today we’re featuring an interview Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, conducted with Carbonite‘s manager of market and competitive intelligence, Victoria Lefevers.
Episode #102 of the B2B Market Research Podcast During this podcast, we cover: What Agile is and what it can do for your B2B market research efforts. Why Agile is no longer limited to the technical software industry or product development. How to leverage Agile for fast, optimal “no surprise” results for clients. Thank you for ...
What have I learned after recording 100 competitive intelligence podcasts? A lot. Here are the top ten B2B Market Research podcasts and the things I learned behind the scenes. In this podcast I cover: What I’ve learned from producing 100 podcast episodes. The top 10 posts as defined by Google Analytics and social sharing data. Which ...
Today, we’re featuring a conversation Sean Campbell, Cascade Insights’ CEO, recently had with Thomas Miller. Thomas is a faculty member at Northwestern University and has written a really fascinating book on predictive data analytics called Web and Network Data Science: Modeling Techniques in Predictive Analytics. Sean: So my first question for you, Tom, is if you would ...
Episode #100 of the B2B Market Research Podcast: Lost a Client? Don’t Generalize from a Specific During this podcast, we cover: How to determine if losing a client is an isolated incident or if you have a new competitor. Why it’s important to enlist your sales team’s help. How to build a digital footprint of the competitor by investigating its size, workforce, partnerships, ...
Episode #99 of the B2B Market Research Podcast – Predicting Competitor Growth – 3 Tools for Analyzing the Buyer’s Journey. We cover: Competitive intelligence tools for analyzing relative search engine rankings and web traffic data. How the B2B buyer’s journey is rapidly changing. Why it is imperative to leverage the predictive capabilities of competitive intelligence tools. Subscribe to our ...
Business people commonly discuss how to emulate Apple’s success. Let us be clear, there’s probably little that many businesses can learn from Apple. In point of fact, both of Apple’s wildest successes have held the seeds of their own undoing. Just as Apple’s success at the dawn of the personal computer era was eclipsed by ...
To understand what a competitor is likely to do, put yourself in their shoes. That’s the core idea of wargaming, a framework for setting strategy that dates back at least to Frederick the Great. Using a variety of approaches that range from thought experiments to computer modeling, teams answer the question, “if I had the ...
It is a basic truism that producing customer value in excess of your cost to provide it creates profit. Michael Porter helps unpack the deeper mechanics of this process with the value chain analysis framework in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. In theory, every step of a company’s activity should add ...
Effective positioning within a market segment requires an understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of your company and its offerings against the competition. While benchmarking is a key capability to fulfill that goal, common misunderstandings about the goals and practices around benchmarking can limit success, even by skilled competitive intelligence organizations. Refining the Definition ...
Weighted Ranking Analysis for Competitive Intelligence A substantial portion of competitive intelligence practice is applying structured methodologies to decision making, both to improve the quality of decisions and to build consensus around those decisions. As introduced in The Thinker’s Toolkit, by Morgan D. Jones, weighted ranking is a powerful set of critical thinking tools that ...
Competitive intelligence gathering typically requires going beyond online sources, to interviewing human subjects. Even if it’s well within your comfort zone to contact and get information from a group of strangers, the guidelines discussed here can make the process smoother and more successful. Contacting Human Intelligence Subjects To initiate the process of gathering human intelligence, ...
On planes, trains, and bedside tables, good business books are filled with the opportunities that flow from fresh insights. We make it a habit to read as many of them as we can, and we make recommendations at classes, conferences, and just about everywhere we go. This article builds on a previous one on we ...
Journalists, analysts, market researchers – how often do you hear these people referred to as spies? And yet, for the competitive intelligence professional, it’s all too common to hear, “Oh, so you’re a spy!” While CI certainly draws some techniques from the intelligence community, deep and clear differences exist, with regard to both ethics and ...
Every organization presents moments of opportunity that watchful competitors can take advantage of. For example, during the end-of-year holiday season, operations at most companies in the US and many other parts of the world are virtually at a standstill. That near-hibernation may last four to six weeks or more, and it’s just one of many ...
Information about competitors’ pricing is a very common competitive intelligence request. This effort generally requires triangulation and assembly of data from multiple sources, although you might get lucky starting with open source intelligence from the Internet. You can start with a Google search of a competitor name and phrases such as “price list,” perhaps adding ...
As a product or technology matures, the profile of a “new customer” changes, from the fast movers always on the bleeding edge, to the mainstream majority, to those that want tried-and-true commodity solutions. The Technology Adoption Lifecycle can be used as a competitive intelligence framework to illuminate how sales strategies should address those groups. In ...