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INDUSTRY INSIGHT The Social Evolution of Competitive Intelligence
As the “Age of Social Media” advances and intersects with the “Age of the Consumer” the fundamental foundation of competitive intelligence is evolving. Never before has there been such a massive wealth of insight on the actions, decisions and market perceptions of competitors. And never before has gaining deep understanding of one’s competitors been so accessible. Consumers today are empowered with an array of digital social tools which provide immediate information and engagement, ultimately compressing the sales cycle and decision process for many items, irrespective of cost. This has posed a massive challenge for almost every brand to understand the path-to-purchase in order to strategically engage and ultimately influence the buying decision. Whereas many brands view this as a daunting challenge, many other brands are viewing this as a massive opportunity. With billions upon billions of social discussions occurring daily, brands can now not only gain unprecedented insight into the market stance of own brands, but also gain deep understanding of their competitors – often more so than the competitors understand themselves. Gone are the early days of social media where vague, unactionable “buzz” was the focus. Social intelligence is derived from social “big data,” delivering way beyond the typical “big data” hype given the strategic, actionable value it provides to leading brands, particularly around competitive insight. Through the use of advanced data processing technology, concept modeling and discovery tools, uncovering valuable insight on both the corporation and its competitors is achievable despite the daunting volume, variety and velocity of social media data. Companies leveraging this intelligence are gaining a multidimensional competitive advantage by understanding the opinions, experiences and behaviors of millions of consumers. Intelligence Impact The value of social intelligence is multidimensional, delivering deep insight, directly from millions of consumer. What’s more important is that the intelligence can be highly specific, and thus actionable, to help guide decisions, set strategy and drive innovation. Aside from this, the real-time, ongoing nature of the discussion allows brands to immediately identify consumer and market shifts and trends in relation to competitors to strategically adjust in real-time. Within a myriad of insights, here’s a look a few major impact applications social intelligence is providing to competitive intelligence today: Mapping Shoppers: Social intelligence facilitates deeper understanding of specific consumer demand points and decision drivers that ultimately motivate consumers toward a purchase, of either your brand or a competitor’s. From this, shopper paths-to-purchase and customer journeys can be constructed, helping the Marketing team understand and ultimately engage at the right demand moments to influence the decision triggers. This results in smarter, more effective marketing messages, channel selection and audience targeting. Personifying Consumers: Aside from understanding the decisions and paths consumers take to purchase a product or service, social intelligence also clarifies consumer segments by helping to construct detailed personas, even for competing brands. These personas are developed based on expressed likes, dislikes, interests, actions, attitudes and beliefs across specific segments. It also maps these attributes to actions and decisions. This helps Marketing, Brand and Product teams understand how, where and when to message consumers of competitors. It can also identify key consumer segments that were previously unrevealed. Innovating Products: Often, these newly identified personas drive an added dimension to the organization’s marketing strategy, allowing them to potentially find significant untapped markets through the identification of unique product uses and unmet needs in the market, particularly related to competitors. These factors help guide new product enhancements, feature sets, product introductions and even market entries to align with these discoveries. This significantly mitigates risks in the process and provides a deeper understanding to effectively drive innovation. Competitor Analysis: One of the fastest-growing strategic areas advanced social intelligence is being used for is with competitive analysis. Marketers can now achieve powerful insight on the competition based on consumer behavior, product usage and switching and specific feature attitudes. Marketing teams can also gain deep understanding of their competitors’ reputations and market reactions towards its decisions or actions, often better than they understand them themselves, which delivers great power to set and execute strategy on a wide array of fronts. Testing Efficacy: Through all of this, the real-time nature of social intelligence can provide timely feedback on market and product testing in terms of aspects like messaging, packaging, segments and channel selection compared to competitive products. Social intelligence allows for multidimensional, rapid testing with immediate market feedback to identify and enhance the efficacy of these and other product variables. This allows Marketers to test and measure specific feature and benefit sentiment to drive sales and understand how they can strategically beat specific competitors. Making the Leap While other teams across the enterprise, such as Finance and Technology wait and wonder if the promise of “big data” will ever come to fruition, the ability for Competitive Intelligence teams to conduct digital consumer ethnography via real-time streaming “big data” processing is a reality today. Within the billions of daily social discussions is revolutionary insight that Competitive Intelligence teams are delivering to help Marketing, Brand and Product understand, engage and win consumers over the competition. The key to achieving this is to embrace social media as a big data challenge rather than a focus on mere “buzz.” With the merging of today’s “Age of Social Media” and “Age of the Consumer” shoppers are more empowered and savvy as the purchase cycle for many products continues to contract. Given this, it has become critical for Competitive Intelligence teams to gain deep understanding of the consumer demand moments and decision points that ultimately influence purchases, particularly of competing brands. Unlocking social intelligence from the within the big data tsunami that is social media is the key to achieving this. And several smart Competitive Intelligence teams have already figured this out, providing massive advantages to their brands and companies. Mark Harrington is Chief Marketing Officer of ListenLogic (ListenLogic.com), a pioneering provider of advanced social intelligence and threat detection for many of the world’s leading brands. Previously, Mark has served strategic leadership roles for Citi, eBay and Pearson. |
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