Oppenheimer’s advice above—that your real secrets are your intentions—also applies here. Avoid talking about what you plan in internal publications; they can get to the public. Make it a standard for your employees to decline to answer unexpected questions. Indoctrinate managers and your senior employees that bragging and blabbing are forbidden. Even if you’re not a government contractor required to maintain security, remember the World War II slogan, “the walls have ears.” Because information is squirreled away on your firm’s computers, keep information about your plans and intentions as safe as, if not safer than, your customer data.
What the software industry calls “vaporware” can be used as a way to deflect the competition. Vaporware is the public announcement of future products that you intend (or don’t intend) to market in the near term. Observing competitive responses can help you understand whether investing in the vaporware’s ideas is worthwhile.
Finally, studying yourself as you would competitors will help you identify what competitors will look for and hence what you need to protect.
CI groups are most often found in large (e.g., Fortune 500) firms. However, for some small firms, a single individual may be charged with the CI task, or it may be assigned to BI analysts. There are estimates that CI is performed at some level by 80 percent to 90 percent of firms, either through in-house groups, outsourcing, or consulting firms hired for specific tasks. The required skills include being able to find competitive information, to analyze what is found, and to communicate findings—that is, the ability to convert results into a form that can be understood by managers. A comprehensive discussion of starting a CI group is found in Sawka and Hohhof (2008; References).
The nature of competitive intelligence exposes CI analysts to ethical dilemmas, both in the work they do and in tasks assigned to them. An ethical code is prescribed by their professional organization, the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals (www.scip.org). Analysts must, of course, comply with applicable laws such as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (approved by 46 states) and the U.S. Espionage Act of 1996, and must respect their own firm’s proprietary rules about information. They should tell the truth, use their own names and affiliations when making inquiries or interviewing, and do fact checking. Hacking, dumpster diving, physical intrusion of a competitor’s facilities, and bribery may be tempting but are not ethical and are almost always illegal.
Competitive intelligence is used for marketing and sales, public relations and customer management, and making strategic decisions. The decision to alter strategy, for example, requires CI input when there are changes in the business environment, proposals for mergers or acquisitions, or new competitors.
Although companies and governments are secretive about their competitive intelligence activities, some consulting firms (many in the UK) do publish case examples on the Web, some only in capsule form. As you would expect, these cases, being advertising for the firms, all show positive results and are concerned with specific competitor intelligence. Here are a few examples.
A credit union with high operating costs was facing stiff competition from local banks with lower operating costs. The staff ran CI on their local competitors to find a competitive strategy. They developed an intelligence database that included, among other things, competitive data that was known by their own employees; third-party interviews with competitors; want ads that appeared regularly in the local newspaper; competitor 10K forms; results of satisfaction surveys (run on their own and their competitor’s depositors); purchased industry, marketing, and forecasting data; and demographic forecasts from the U.S. Census Bureau.
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