CI - Just for Big Businesses? Think Again.
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Think competitive intelligence is mostly relevant for bigger companies? Trademark searching for competitive intelligence may be even more vital if you’re a small or medium-sized business.
Often, in this blog, in order to provide recognizable examples, we refer to well know-brands and companies. Chances are, however, that you and your competitor are not P&G, Apple or Pepsi (there’s a reason it’s called Fortune 500 not 300,000).
Vernon Prior astutely remarks:
“If, for instance, a large multinational corporation fails to read the market correctly it can often buy its way out of the problem. A small business making a similar mistake will probably fail completely. In some ways, then, involvement in competitive intelligence is much more important for a small business than it is for a large one.”
Further, a smaller business has its own niche markets and needs to be to keep abreast of new developments. Sharing the same niche market with only a few competitors means an even greater need to look over your shoulder.
“Obviously, if you have an SME [small and medium enterprise] and wish to compete effectively, you should aim to offer something different. …you need to find out what is going on, decide what to do about it and take action before your competitors. That, very simply, is competitive intelligence (CI).”
Smaller businesses are faced with too many elements to keep track of, and up until very recently, developing an efficient competitive intelligence strategy was a daunting endeavor. Watching your competitor involved monitoring every possible source to figure out what your competition was doing, planning and so forth. This was not only time-consuming - but also beyond the scope of many smaller businesses. How many truly have the time or resources necessary to dig “into every corner and crevice available” in order to fully understand where they stand and what to do next ?
Missing something pivotal, as Vernon Prior mentioned, can be the kiss of death. You need to know about developments, as they happen. By the time the news of your competitors new product or direction hits the stands (or the net), your competitive advantage is generally lost.
Overall, of course, there is less information readily available for small companies – but this could work in your favour: having fewer competitors with smaller trademark portfolios means that a given filing by any of one of them speaks volumes about future plans.
Filings for marks in categories different from existing products may reveal that they are trying to offer a new feature to an existing product or have identified a growing demand - or even a new market to tap into.
Of course, trying to discern this by traditional trademark watching, only gives you a part of the picture. CI Sense presents information in context within your industry so that you can use it to watch trends and focus on brand competition. Our mission is to bridge the gap between trademarks and competitive intelligence.
We don’t just hand over raw trademark data. We ask the hard questions: what do you really want to know; is there a new competitor in your market; what are emerging trends in your industry? We combine automated indexing and categorization systems with human intelligence and expertise to provide the context that adds insight to trademark descriptions.
And you can compete as though you’re a big fish – even if you happen to be a size smaller.
