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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: Questions
Quick Tip
A key competitive intelligence skill is the ability to distinguish what you do know from what you don't know. The effort is then to find out sources for the unknown information - as the great English writer, Dr Samuel Johnson said:
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Unfortunately even with the knowledge there can be problems. Lewis Branscomb - the US physicist and Harvard management professor once said:
People rarely distinguish among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. But they are as different from each other and as interlocking as starch molecules, flour, bread, and the flavorful memory of a superb morning croissant.
The aim of competitive & marketing intelligence is to turn data into something that can lead to competitive advantage in the same way that your morning croissant or loaf of bread depends on flour and water interacting to make something that is more than just a mixture of the raw ingredients.
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