AUTHOR
Lindholm, Tiina; Virtanen, Annika

DATE
2000-02-14

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Industrial marketing and e-commerce

SUMMARY
Competitor intelligence process starts with planning following with collecting, analysing, communicating and using the competitor intelligence. All of these steps face different kinds of problems. In general the companies interviewed did no systematic planing. Information sources used by the companies varied from newspapers to consultants. As claimed in the theory analysis function is the key element of the intelligence system, however, none of the companies used specific tools for conducting analysis. Most of the companies used e-mail or Intranet for communicating the intelligence to the ones requesting it. Also short verbal presentations were used. All the companies thought that the information collected is also used in one way or another. However, generally it was hard to estimate how much of the intelligence provided leaded to some new decisions. Our findings indicate that the competitor intelligence cannot be clearly described as a process and the stages are overlapping each other.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--00/029--SE / NR 2000:029