Competitive intelligence (CI) is the practice of analyzing how your company compares to its competitors. This can be achieved by understanding how competitors advertise and market to their customers, measuring how you interact with your customers, identifying how your company delivers a superior customer experience, and learning from industry research to understand competitive trends and issues. CI also examines the structure and competitive characteristics of your industry, and differentiates between initiatives and strategies.
A competitive intelligence platform is a web-based intelligence gathering system that provides the ability to visualize data, identify patterns and insights, and view internal information sources for company-specific or global intelligence. With the release of the NetBase Quid platform, NetBase, Inc. has taken the information gathering and reporting of competitive intelligence to a next generation state, making it an extremely powerful and valuable tool for consumers and brands, alike.
Understand Customer Behavior
The company’s machine learning algorithms understand customer behavior at a deeply contextual level, allowing NetBase to understand what consumers are really thinking and want. It can then bring this to life in rich visualizations, ensuring insight, intelligence and influence, to inform your marketing, brand, and growth initiatives.
NetBase Quid is the only platform of its kind to combine all the above into a single platform. With its purpose-built platform, it enables comprehensive consumer insights and engagement research, real-time predictive analytics, and actionable reports. It’s the discipline of looking at how people behave and act in a market and observing it to predict the future success of a company. Usually, the intelligence team takes a small sample of relevant companies to uncover patterns within the market; then develop a model to predict the behaviors of potential competitors and to gauge the likelihood of success for new innovations. They also observe how things affect the market and check on negative activity to quantify the amount of damages suffered from disruption. It does the following.
- Analyze hundreds of millions of consumers and business subscribers
- Customize and personalize insights and shareable graphics and data
- Drive key business decisions and actionable insights
- Connect with more than 10,000 customers across enterprises, industries and sectors
- Integrate key business intelligence systems across data-driven industries
- Analyze data to understand and identify new markets and new opportunities
- Hear from decision-makers across the marketing and brand landscape
Consumer Insight
When it comes to consumer insight, there are several ways to collect data. Some run them with a paper survey, others on a CRM system. Whatever the process, it’s a continuous process and the data is acquired by many paths. Competitive intelligence is about understanding your target audiences. There are different levels of intelligence available. The first one is understanding your competitors, the strategies they are employing, the innovation they are bringing to the market, and the opportunities they have and the threats they pose. The second level is about understanding your own market. You need to know who you are, who your competitors are, where you are going, and how your strategy fits in the market.
The third level is the macro level: How your industry is changing, what your competition is doing, what is happening with the market and consumer. Then you need to dig into the details of that industry to understand the challenges, the main players, and their core competencies. Most companies struggle to stay ahead of the competition, even when they have the resources and talent. They struggle to find opportunities to differentiate from their competitors and stay ahead of the curve, when their competitors are the same companies that they are competing against. They also struggle to understand their customers, their competitors and the market, because they don’t have the right tools to track their success.
NetBase Quid Role
NetBase Quid gives companies deep insights into their customers. The process involves monitoring and tracking competitors to identify important trends, competitor dynamics and insights in the marketplace, allowing a business to better identify and market to its target audience. By understanding your competitors’ path to success, business executives and decision makers can make more informed and strategic decisions.
There is no company on the planet that isn’t curious about what its competitors are doing. NetBase Quid offers real-time insight into every aspect of the market, from stocks to banking, automotives and retail. Coupled with the NetBase Platform and NetBase Quid Qui Qui (QQQ) and NetBase Qui Qui’s instant, real-time forecasts for retail, financials, automakers and others, NetBase Quid is a must-have intelligence tool for business professionals.