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AWARE Help & Support
Tips & Ideas for Better Practice
 AWARE aims to help organizations become the best in their sector. As part of our mission, we offer a number of tips and ideas that should help your competitive and marketing intelligence processes. Some will be directly relevant - while some are aimed to provoke thought and comment.
Our goal is to help you think outside the box - to be creative. It is only through being creative that you will be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors in the long-term - and thereby achieve long-term competitive advantage.
The tips and ideas on these pages are different from those we include on our Frequently asked questions on CI pages. Some are based on items published in AWARE's newsletter. They include business models, concepts and thoughts that you can use when looking at your own organization and processes.
Let us have feedback on what you like, what worked, what didn't (and why). Also, let us know if you have any tips that you'd like us to publish on these pages. We'll include full attribution, and contact details for any tips or ideas published.
This month's Tips
What is a competitor?
This tip looks at a number of definitions of "competitor" and how choosing the wrong definition can impact approaches to competitive strategy and understanding. (More)
Avoid Price Wars
This tip examines the impact of a price war on company profitability, and suggests a few ways to avoid such battles. (More)
Stengths, Benefits & Features
Understanding the difference is essential for effective marketing strategies. This tip defines strengths, benefits and features and gives an example of the differences (More)
Information Categories
There are 4 types of information available to companies:
- what we know we know;
- what we know we don't know;
- what we don't know we know;
- what we don't know we don't know.
This tip examines each of these categories, and their implications for CI! (More)
Evaluating Risk
What is your viewpoint? Are you one of those who avoids risk-taking and prefers safety, or do you relish new opportunities? This tip looks at why in today's world, risk-taking in business has become a necessity for survival. (More)
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Quick Tip: Deadly Sins
The Seven Deadly Business Sins
1) Greed - Are you satisfied with what you've achieved or are you always seeking more, and never consolidating and strengthening what you currently have?
2) Opinion - Do you ever dismiss ideas without analysis? There have been many opportunities that were missed because opinionated management failed to see the wider picture.
3) Routine - Just because something worked in the past does not mean that it will continue to work in the future.
4) Emotion - Is the reason for your decision based on analysis, or emotion? Many managers are driven by their fears and desires without ever stopping to justify the reason for their fear or hatred or love. Often these prove to be unjustified and unjustifiable.
5) Ego - Do you make decisions because you are the cleverest, the biggest, the market leader? Are you obsessed with your own image and abilities? Many leaders in the past also thought that they were invincible. A quick look at history shows that they were not!
6) Success - Over-confidence is dangerous and can blind you to competitors seeking to emulate your success.
7) Hope - Can you justify your reasons why things will improve, or are you just burying your head in the sand, and refusing to see reality?
These seven deadly business sins are based on some work by Ben Gilad, one of the foremost Competitive Intelligence experts. Businesses need to understand their blindspots - what they would rather not see, and work to remove them. Each of these seven sins is a type of blindspot if it dominates the thinking within the company. It's OK to have each to a certain degree, balanced by the others. (All businesses need to believe in themselves, have hope, aim to make money....). The problem is when one aspect starts to govern the way things are done in the company, preventing rational and logical thought.
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