Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
An activity of continuous interpretation that seeks to understand what a market's movements reveal about the needs, alternatives and choice criteria of the targeted customer.
Full definition
In ordinary corporate usage, the term designates monitoring competitors: their announcements, their releases, their prices, their hires. The exercise is then surveillance, and its output a record.
In the articles on this blog, the word is used in a narrower sense, explicitly opposed to the first: an activity of interpretation, not of surveillance. Its object isn't the competitor but the customer — competitors enter only as revealers of what a market has understood, or not yet understood, about that customer's needs. Its output isn't a map of competing features, it is a better understanding of the alternatives that count and of the standards on the rise.
The gap between the two usages is the subject of the criticism itself: what many companies call competitive intelligence is, in the sense retained here, benchmarking.
Usage in the field
The term comes into play in organizing a product team's work — who follows what, how often, to feed which decision — in preparing a committee, and in arbitrating a request to catch up functionally.
Synonyms and variants
Market intelligence, competitive intelligence, "following the competition".
Not to be confused with
- Benchmark — Benchmark — a comparison of visible elements at a given instant, whose output is a table; it is the level below, and the most frequent substitute.
- Positioning — Positioning — a statement of the defensible place against alternatives; intelligence consumes it in order to interpret, it doesn't produce it.
- Strategy — Strategy — the arbitration of what you commit to; intelligence feeds it without deciding in its place.
- Weak signal — Weak signal — one of the materials intelligence gathers, on the side of anticipation.
Examples
"Useful competitive intelligence is therefore less an activity of surveillance than an activity of interpretation." — the definition retained here, set against ordinary usage.
"Calling 'competitive intelligence' what is in reality only a record of features" — the ordinary usage, named in order to be set aside.
Ambiguities / debates
The two usages coexist in the same organization without anyone separating them, which makes the word unreliable in meetings: two people can agree on the need to "do market intelligence" while one means a monthly comparison table and the other a continuous work of interpretation. The sense retained here is the second, and it presupposes that the first be named benchmark.