Competitive Intelligence Professionals Tap Into New Sources
Jinfo Blog

By Sophie Alexander

Abstract

With the FreePint Topic Series: Next-Generation Competitive Intelligence well underway, Sophie Alexander highlights some of the most recent articles and product reviews from the series.

Item

Competitive Intelligence in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The FreePint Topic Series: Next-Generation Competitive Intelligence continues to explore some of the key issues in the area of Competitive Intelligence (CI), with a particular focus most recently on the pharmaceutical industry.

Robin Neidorf's "Making Information Visible in Pharmaceutical Companies" takes a look at recent primary research and discussions that took place with pharmaceutical companies. This included identifying what is meant by "information discovery" as well as examining methods of discovery and satisfaction with approaches to discovery.

Yulia Aspinall also wrote about the pharma industry in her blog item entitled "A 'Survival Kit' for Biopharma CI Professionals". Yulia focuses on smaller pharma companies and start-up biotechs as these companies cannot always afford access to the more traditional published intelligence and she offers some useful tips on how these companies can still compete on a limited budget.

More Creative Sources for Competitive Intelligence

With the arrival of new products, technologies and product innovations, competitive intelligence professionals need to be on the lookout for early warning signs of competitor actions that may threaten their company's market share.

As Madhu Subramanian points out in her article "Creative Sources of Competitive Intelligence", traditional sources of intelligence are of paramount importance but you also need to be more creative and not neglect sources that we might not ordinarily consider relevant to competitive intelligence.

Monitoring Tools, Job Boards and Google Trends Are All Important

Madhu points out how nearly every leading company has invested in social media competitor monitoring initiatives for the key insights they offer and highlights a number of monitoring tools you could use yourself in addition to the valuable nuggets of information that can be found on commonly-used tools such as LinkedIn and SlideShare.

Job postings on job boards can also highlight hiring trends, salaries, products and changes in marketing strategy and creative uses of Excel can help you to map this data and find patterns.

Keeping track of competitor announcements as soon as they happen is vital and Madhu offers some examples of useful webpage monitoring tools as well as how Google Trends can be used to capture user sentiment in relation to a particular product, with key news announcements being captured over time.

A B2B Information Service for Sales & Marketing Professionals

Finally, following on from Chris Porter's Q&A with the recently rebranded Avention, you can also read his product review of the company's recently released new product, also named Avention.

Aimed at sales and marketing professionals and researchers, it offers a B2B information service providing information about companies, executives and industries.

Some of the notable features of the product that you can read about in the review include Conceptual Search, Business Signals, Ideal Profile and SmartList.

Keep an eye out for series producer Mary Ellen Bercik's final update which will highlight key reviews in progress and yet to be published in this series.

Editor's Note

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Next-Generation Competitive Intelligence running from May-June 2014. Register your interest now, and you'll also get a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on Competitive Intelligence when it's published in June.

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