Competitive intelligence is one of the most important ways a company can understand market trends and where its competitors are innovating and positioning themselves. Without it, a company’s strategy will be misinformed.
Competitive Intelligence is tough though, especially for small private companies. Fortunately there are a growing number of useful and free competitive intelligence tools to help. Here are a few of our favorites:

Archive.org allows you to dig up past versions of a company’s website. If one of your competitors wrote a case study in 2005 that you want but is no longer on their website, archive.com might be able to help you find it. Using Archive.org also lets you see how your competitor’s go-to-market strategy has evolved over time.

Spyfu. This is a goldmine for understanding competitors’ online advertising. Using it, you can determine what keywords your competition uses for AdWords, what their daily AdWords budget is, and what their daily traffic volume is. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Slideshare.net is essentially a search engine for PowerPoint presentations… but it is usually possible to dig up ‘confidential’ presentations and templates that can be very informative.

LinkedIn can be used for more than just social networking. It can give you estimates on a company’s size, its turnover, and what positions, if any, are currently open. But be careful – for smaller companies (under 100 people) LinkedIn is usually an inaccurate portrayal of current staffing.

Yesterday I commented that the business world is changing more rapidly than it used to. That’s obvious to all of us. The implication for companies is that reacting to change is no longer enough for survival. For a company to survive – and certainly to thrive – it must proactively adapt to change. It must spot trends before and as they emerge, and innovate in order to enjoy success in the future.

How can a business do this? It isn’t as mysterious as having a crystal ball. The great innovative companies that I’ve seen do it through these four tools:

1. They use customer insight and competitive intelligence tools that work, and they try new ones as they emerge.  (I’ll write about some cool new competitive intelligence tools in my next blog.)
2. They have internal and external feedback mechanisms to track customer and employee satisfaction and capture ideas.
3. They have structures that are lean and nimble so they can innovate and implement new ideas quickly.
4. They are open to the possibility that they don’t know everything, and build structures to allow them to tap into market movements that are difficult to foresee.  One tool for this is a Gambling Fund.  I’ll also write about this in a later blog.

In my previous post, I talked about Darwin’s law of evolution (roughly – “it’s not the strongest that survive, it’s the ones that adapt best to change”) and how it applies equally well to business as species evolution. I wanted to elaborate on what ‘adaptability’ means for business. There are many facets:

– The ability to shift market focus when necessary
– A management structure that can make decisions quickly
– An ability to listen to customers, continually update marketing tactics and innovate products and services
– The capability to scale production to changing market demand without adversely affecting margins
– The ability to shift resources from poorly-performing areas into more lucrative areas

The question for business is whether adaptability is only effective as a proactive skill (eg the ability to forecast market trends and reposition in advance of those trends becoming widely apparent) or whether adaptability is equally effective as a reactive tool.

Is a business adaptable only if it consistently spots trends as they emerge?  Or is it also adaptable if it reacts to a trend that has already become clear in the market?

Based on my experience, I think businesses are adaptable first and foremost if they can react to change.  The reality is that markets often don’t change as quickly as we think they will.  A business that can see that a market has changed and react to that change effectively will be a successful business over the long term, for the most part.  (Yes, there are some stunning examples – like the photo processing market – that refute this).

And that’s where I think this reality is changing.  The world is changing faster than it used to.  As an example, the adoption of social media tools has been much more rapid than, say, the adoption of TV or radio.  So while businesses have been able to survive based on the ability to react to change, I think it is becoming essential for businesses to be able to proactively address change.

In my next post I’ll talk about how companies can do that.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

-Charles Darwin

Although Darwin’s quote described how organisms within a species evolve, it applies just as well – maybe even better – to the world of business.

New corporate entities exist in a competitive environment where — if they can first clear the barriers to entry — they either compete in a market rife with substitutes or seek to persuade buyers that their innovative new products are worth a look. Not an easy task.

But being the strongest or the biggest doesn’t guarantee survival.  Business history is full of examples of companies who were at the top of their industry at one point, but failed to adapt –

Take Nokia. It was wildly successful for a spell, and then failed to anticipate the rise of the smartphone.  As a result, it lost almost a billion dollars and its market share slipped.

Blockbuster is another.  For years, it was the only game in town. But it didn’t adapt to the broadband age, and certainly didn’t understand how Netflix would alter its competitive landscape.  The former can be attributed to a fear of cannibalizing; the latter to hubris or complacency (or ignorance?). The end result, in any case, is a company teetering on the brink.

Toyota is an interesting current example. While it was at the peak of the automotive industry, the sticky gas and brake pedals have now toppled it from that perch. It will be interesting to watch how Toyota navigates through its current maelstrom and whether it adapts to its new reality.

The motto for all CEOs – it’s not how smart you are, but how fast you adapt that makes your business successful.  And how fast you adapt depends on understanding your market, staying in touch with customer needs, assessing your competitors, and innovating constantly.

Hillary Clinton said following the Haiti Donor Summit in Montreal last week, “We’re trying to do this in the correct order. Sometimes people have pledging conferences and pledge money and they don’t have any idea what they’re going to do with it.  We actually think it’s a novel idea to do the needs assessment first, and then the planning, and then the pledging.” 

The world leaders at the Summit have it right.  Whether you’re a business, a non-profit or a government, it always makes sense toassess, then plan, then implement.  This is hard to do in the face of disaster – when the first reaction is to do something, anything, to make things better.  But we’ve seen the consequences of failing to assess and plan in incidents large and small throughout history.  Take the case of US aid to India in the 50s and 60s – massive wheat donations disrupted the country’s agricultural market and ultimately bankrupted thousands of farmers.  After the fact, many realized that the ‘charitable aid’ was responsible for millions of Indians starving.

Clinton’s ‘Assess, Plan, Implement’ mantra is a great lesson for businesses of all sizes too: no matter how urgent your situation seems, key decisions should still be carefully assessed. Proper planning that ensures that your efforts are actionable, scalable, and transparent can bring results that are transformative. Lack of planning can make a bad situation worse.

The media and business community love stories of rapid growth. But this Canadian Business article sheds some light on the downside of overnight success – through interesting examples like Krispy Kreme and Megan Fox.  Turns out that business trends are being adopted – and becoming extinct – faster now than in the past.  A study from Wharton shows that it isn’t the products that are the problem – it’s the speed with which they grow. The study found that once something reaches a certain level of popularity, people no longer want to be identified with it. They’re happy to join when it’s on the upswing, but loathe to do so on the other side of the curve.

The message for business: don’t turn your good product into a trendy item that may have a great ride up, just for the glory of it – because it may mean an unnecessary and untimely ride down.