Competitor Research

Do you know

• What your competitors are planning?
• How they are doing?
• The prices of their products?
• Their R&D activities?
• Their management style and culture?
• Their sales tactics?
• Their financial capabilities...?

Do you really know - or are you depending on what you've read in the trade journals or heard through the grapevine?

Our competitor research services are aimed at helping you find the answers to questions like this and more. We offer both primary and secondary research aimed at finding the truth.

There is a lot more material available from secondary sources than can be found on Google. Much of this is hidden and can't be found using conventional search engines - including information held on deep-web databases that are missed by most search engines.

• We'll check news archive databases globally, looking for items mentioning your competitor, their products, people or technologies.
• We'll scan the industry and regional press world-wide for relevant mentions.
• We'll check patent and trademark databases, company filing records, planning applications, European Union and UK government records and more.

We are known as experts in Internet and Online searching - frequently leading workshops on finding competitive intelligence using online sources. However to obtain really meaningful intelligence requires primary research. Whereas secondary research gives background and suggests possibilities it is the primary research sources that can tell you what competitors are thinking and planning - their future goals, beliefs, strategies and assumptions.

We'll carry out in-depth interviews with customers, suppliers, ex-competitor employees, industry experts, trade journalists and often even your competitor to find the answers to what you need to know about your competitors. (We don't trawl through dustbins and trashcans though. We view this as unethical behaviour. We do adhere to the SCIP code of ethics and won't use illegal or unethical methods for gathering either primary or secondary source information).

The aim is to anticipate. To enable you to anticipate what your competitors will do next, so that you can preempt them - so that you can outwit them - so that you can be first. Ultimately, so that you can be the best!