How Are Companies Already Analyzing Competition Online?

By Margot B
Posted Friday, December 10, 2004

scan press articles/ financial news about competitors, examine Web sites for any differences or interesting features, find out where and how their competitors advertise: check out news journals, newspapers.... By analyzing buying patterns. If it's a new company, its growth is targeted, watching customer defections---but the systems for analyzing competitors' businesses are inadequate and usually must be done manually by entering values on a spreadsheet to generate graphs and reports. The data volumes have to be small and manual entry is slow and prone to error.

By blending a company's own internal data with external research data, competitive threats are assessed and a response is formulated. Getting an understanding of where their competitors are in the marketplace so they can determine where their company can offer incentives to increase their market share.

To do this they sometimes pay their competitors a sneaky visit; talk to sales staff, ask questions and compare their products and prices with their own. On the Internet they scan press articles and financial news about their competitors. They examine the web sites for any differences or interesting features. They find out where and how their competitors advertise by checking out newspapers, business journals, marketing and advertising publications and the Yellow Pages. They research online with data monitor reports.

Sometimes they hire freelance researchers, but information is also obtained by searching industry reports, secondary data, observation, catalogs, promotional material, press cutting and market profiles by "Data Monitor".

By hiring companies such as The Gartner Group and Forrester International Data Corp to analyze their competitors.

These companies use surveys and interviews, and hosting forums, as well as their secondary research, i.e. published statistics, etc. They analyze both vendor and market information, they watch for emerging trends, aggregate a lot of raw data and different data points, synthesize it and use it as a guidepost.

(http://www.bbc) (http://www.adassoc.org.uk) [13Jul. 01] Currently available on WARC.com INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING - Citation index and Selected Abstracts from 1978; Selected Full text from 1982. There is an approximate 6-month delay between hard copy being published and articles appearing on WARC.com Perry, Graham, Business Development Manager, Kenan Systems (http://www.telecomagazine.com/issues/199703/tci/perry.html) (3/1997) [13 Jul. 01] (http://www.clearlybusiness.com/business/bi00018.htm) "Data Monitor":

(http://profiles.datamonitor.com/MarketIntro.asp?cust=99C908AD-70D2 4735-BDA1-0769382 FBC24)

(http://it.mycareer.com.au/e-commerce/20000926/A12502-2000Sep22.html) [13 Jul. 01]

By Margot B
mailto:margotb@wonderport.com
(http://margotb.tk) (http://www.worldisround.com/home/margotb/index.html)

About the Author
Margot B is a writer & web site designer - has written a book and 100s of articles specializing in health and the environment. mailto:margotb@wonderport.com
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