Competitive Intelligence Essay

1. Introduction

Competitive Intelligence (CI). A practice or way of getting any kind of upper hand to your competitor, something that is so vital to any business trying to take over it’s respective industry. Something as important as this would generally be in the idea of being important to any business big or small. This is not the case, most conference presentations and examples of Competitive Intelligence are associated with large scale companies. The question here is why? CI is normally seen as too challenging to the typical small business owner, the process is too difficult and time consuming. Maybe those reasons could be true, but this doesn’t change the fact that CI can be used for small businesses, if a different way around it is

The main issue here regarding small and medium sized businesses not being seen as necessary enterprises for CI lies in the owners of these businesses, a lot of them not exactly knowing the power of it or having the knowledge of this process. Some owners just find it too expensive, time consuming and difficult to do. And a lot of businesses will struggle because of a lack of research done in the market, because of the way in which it chooses to run business, also the newer or smaller businesses do not actually find themselves securing a place within the market they are in, a market in which they have a very reasonable chance of success. In other instances, a new venture will struggle with competing with bigger competition whilst they are focusing on price, and then you get the bunch of businesses that opening business to customers and hoping they will rush to buy your product is the key to success.

In order to help, discuss this in the greatest of detail, the paper will examine research findings on small business priorities, looking at what a small business should be focused while giving a CI on each priority. The type of values that are gained in the business through CI and lastly a detailed list and explaining of examples of how a small business can use CI to maximize success. This will make the main discussion of the

For example if a small business sells a products on the idea that it is of “high value”, this could increase levels of consumer purchasing. Contrast to this, according to Timmons, (2004), a mistake when it comes to pricing things high is the service normally is based around who can make it the cheapest. Consumers though are more inclined to what is more expensive as they define that as a quality product and history does show that consumers will pay significantly higher prices for a service they feel is of a higher