Competitive Intelligence: Commodity or Business Driver?

Speculation of ongoing inflation and supply chain uncertainty in categories from coffee to catnip are leading retailers to search for profit protection and customer satisfaction by outpricing, outpromoting, and outmerchandising the competition.

But most retailers are under equipped to create or activate a competitive strategy to meet their objectives. Largely because retailers treat competitive intelligence like a commodity instead of a business driver.

How Competitive Data has Become a Commodity

Few would argue that a comprehensive view of the market is important to inform and protect pricing, promotion, positioning, and merchandising/assortment decision making.

However, gaining access to reliable and high-quality competitive intelligence data has proven to be expensive and resource heavy. The result: Retailers question whether the investment is worth the return.

Retailers take actions with their competitive data strategy that leaves any intelligence gained as a “nice to have”:

Quantity Over Quality

Action: Some retailers have simply lost faith for data providers to deliver consistent, high-quality market intelligence. Because of this, some companies have become data collectors… ingesting as much data – for the lowest cost – then reconciling and cleansing it themselves.

Outcome: More data does not equal better actions.

In fact, retailers that take this quantity-over-quality approach find that the investment needed for people to make the data ready for analysis far outweighs the investment in quality data collection and harmonization.

In addition, when the competitive data collected isn’t aligned with a business need, it goes unused. Or by the time it’s accessed, the insights aren’t relevant.

Applying Old Practices to a New World

Action: Today’s retail reality has opened opportunities for you to act more dynamically, own a customer experience outside of the store, and know more about the market than ever before. However, many retailers still think in static, reactionary ways by limiting their intelligence to a few products and a few competitors, collected less often. You might need to rethink operating by sending someone into a store – to of the strategic direction of getting the information to make the best decisions.

Outcome: Unnecessary sacrifices.

Because competitive data collection was limited by the cost of sending someone into a physical store, retailers took the little data they could get. This type of thinking doesn’t work in today’s world where prices, merchandising, availability, and promotions can change by the hour.

Yes, prioritizing data for your company to make actionable decisions with is important, but it should be guided by your growth strategy and not your ability to do more with less.

From Data-Driven to Business Intelligence

Take look at the annual reports of leading brands and retailers.

There are few without some promise or goal about digital transformation and data advancement.

Why? Because data-driven is a non-negotiable in the digital commerce world we operate in.

If data-driven has become a necessity, data cannot be treated like a commodity.

Let’s think about data and analytics differently.

1. Start with the business outcomes you’re looking to drive
2. Prioritize quality, actionability and visibility
3. Limit manual resources instead of limiting market scope
4. Work with a partner to define what’s possible and how data works with existing practices
5. Identify “need to have” information and map a path to scale – new competitors, new channels, new frequencies, etc.
6. Share the plan and outcomes cross-functionally

It’s true that retailers have more data from more places to them available than ever before. While this should result in a greater ability to compete at both a global and granular level, the difficulty to operationalize competitive data to keep up with the dynamic, multi-channel environment has disconnected the intelligence from the data.

It will be collaboration between data providers and strategic retailers that reposition competitive intelligence from commodity to business driver to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers, navigate pricing and supply chain disruption and compete profitably regardless of changes in the future.