SUMMARY

WHITEPAPER

The 5P’s of Competitive

Intelligence
A step-by-step guide to set up an effective CI process

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SUMMARY

The 5P’s of Competitive Intelligence 3

1) Why a CI Challenge? 5

2) What are the 5 steps to take into consideration and why? 6

3) A deep dive into each of the 5P’s 7

A) Process 7
B) Practice 8
C) Product 10
D) Purview 11
E) Purpose 13

4) Conclusion 14

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The 5P’s of Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is crucial to a company’s success story. When actioned correctly, CI can help
organizations navigate through their business environment.

A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers: The Intelligence Gap, found that the critical information that
CEOs need versus what was delivered has remained nearly intact between 2009 to 2019.

The pertinent question is, will this gap be maintained until 2029? Probably not, as the time for CI is now,
believes Luís Madureira.

Figure 1: The intelligence gap has largely remained the same over a decade

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How can you effectively use CI?

If you are wondering how to set up an effective CI process or where to start, ReportLinker and its partner
Überbrands are happy to offer you a step-by-step guide.

The topic has been discussed by Luís Madureira, founder and managing partner @UBERBRANDS and Clare
Eggar, director of clients project @ReportLinker during the webinar The state of the art of Competitive
intelligence in 2022.

In this guide, based on a paper written by Luís Madureira, Ales Popovic, and Mauro Castelli Competitive
intelligence: A unified view and modular definition, we’ll introduce you to the 5P’s famework that will help
you go through the CI challenge.

Luís Madureira
(CI Fellow, CIP-II, CSIP)
Founder and Managing Partner
@UBERBRANDS

Clare Eggar
Director of Clients Project
@ReportLinker

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1. Why a CI Challenge?
Collecting data isn’t enough. You need to identify what is relevant to your organization and can be turned
into insights to enhance your customer experience. However, too much data can be counterproductive as it
can cause information overload, analysis paralysis, misinformation, or even disinformation.

To extract value and succeed, you need to be careful of how you conduct CI and be persistently efficient. And
this is the CI challenge.

To overcome the dilemma, you should aim to produce knowledge on your whole competitive environment
beyond its immediate horizon. For example, seek to create an enterprise-wide approach to your market’s
economic trends, technology trends, and so forth.

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2. What are the 5 steps to take into consideration and why?
Let’s look at the definition of CI as stated by Luís Madureira, Ales Popovic, and Mauro Castelli (2021) in their
paper, Competitive intelligence: A unified view and modular definition.

“CI is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive
environment to improve organizational performance.”

Luís Madureira suggests getting into the five following dimensions – process, practice, product, purview, and
purpose – to ensure you conduct your CI in a structured and disciplined manner so that you don’t miss out
on anything.

Figure 2: The 5 P’s of competitive intelligence

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3. A deep dive into each of the 5P’s
A) Process
The process needs to be systematic to make its output
actionable.
Of the five dimensions, the CI process is the most relevant for a valuable
organization’s strategic decision-making. And it needs to be systematic
to ensure the firm has all the vital information it needs to make its
output actionable.

There are five key steps in the CI process: plan the project, direct it,
collect data, process and analyze it, and make a decision based on the
results.

There is a lot to consider with each of these steps, but each step will
allow you to defuse any upcoming threats, see past market disruptions,
and dispassionately interpret market events.

Figure 3: Activities, procedures, and steps to make

process actionable

The CI process can be fuzzy, so you need to embrace the To leverage all the relevant information, you need to rely on
uncertainty. It is not always a simple process, but it is technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
highly rewarding if you get the best information you need. Either that or you need to outsource your needs to a CI expert for
best results.

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B) Practice
The practice of CI should be
strategic, decision-oriented, and
future-oriented.
The practice of CI is a challenge as it
requires companies to understand not
only other businesses but the intricate
nuances and techniques of their own.

As you learn more about your industry

and your competitors, you should narrow
down your plan for analysis to specific
areas of interest within your company.

Knowing what to identify as an initial

concern within your business, will help
you narrow your search. If there are
any areas of concern, make those your
priority.
Figure 4: CI allows you to make strategic decisions for the future

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The four horizons in the practice of CI
Intelligence should essentially be actionable insights. And the role of CI is not only to collect information
and scan the environment but to support your planning with intelligent insights and strategies.

• Hindsight • What is currently • Early warning system • Develop foresight

the need to understand happening what is going to happen to prepare for the future
the past and how you to understand your in the near future
got to where you are business in real-time

Be curious and have critical thinking to analyze and interpret the collected information correctly

Be customer centric. Integrate your customers into your mindset while creating business practices as customer experience is key to business
success

Have a culture that is intelligence-driven to stay ahead of the pack

Be tech-savvy to understand which technology you need to offer the best customer experience

Master technology to understand the spectrum of opportunities that you can utilize to your advantage

Communicate. Communicating to the right people and with the right format is the key to success.

Implement CI as a function and make sure you have a learning organization that is open to assimilating new information

Just developing insights is not enough. Examine the results of those insights in practice, integrate and learn from your experience to improve
your performance

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C) Product
The CI process comes from a need, this need
is what we call the product.
Once your product is well-identified, you will be able
to define what type of data you need, how to collect
it, and how to process it. Make sure you have vital
information on your product as the top priority.

Depending on your needs, the processing of

actionable insights or knowledge can then be
achieved by machines, or by humans. Ideally, by a
combination of machine and human intelligence, to
create augmented intelligence.

The purpose of augmented intelligence is to improve

your organizational performance by whatever way
you measure it – market shares, the number of
countries you are in, profits, and so on.
Figure 5: Know your product closely for a competitive edge
For CI to be an asset, be sure you have the right
knowledge with the right analytics to respond
effectively.

To help you define your product, ask yourself these questions: Move away from the basic newsletter. You need to understand what
what deliverables do I need? What do I need this information for? is going on in your market, what it means, and what are the potential
paths moving forward. This is what the C-suite is looking for.

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D) Purview
The purview or the scope of CI is to
decide what you should focus and
develop the intelligence on.
With this step, you will delineate the domain in
which opportunities for developing competitive
advantage are identified and strategized. And
this knowledge is developed through different
scopes, such as:

• The external environment

• The internal environment

The external factors include the macro, meso,

and microenvironments.

In brief, while the macro environment includes

Figure 6: External and internal environments of CI
the political, economic, social, technological,
and legal factors, the meso-environment
addresses the market. The microenvironment,
on the other hand, addresses your customers,
products, industry, and your competitors.

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The internal factors cover the environment within your company.

You need to integrate the two scopes to understand your strengths and weaknesses compared with your
competitors.

The secret to performing the CI role better is to set up a set of criteria and questions about your current
strategy and decisions. The goal is to focus on the relevant factors such as the information that decision
makers need so that CI can support their decision-making and help them progress your company strategically.

The main question to be asked is: Where should our focus be? Be careful - don’t forget that business Intelligence (BI) is an integral
part of CI. But while BI is focused on the past – with data on events
that have already occurred – CI focuses on the future.

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E) Purpose
The purpose of CI is a core-defining dimension to
improve organizational performance.
Business competition is increasing every day and the
disruption is happening at an accelerated pace.

According to a global C-suite survey by Accenture: ‘Disruption

need not be an enigma’, 93% of executives believed their
industry will be disrupted at some point in the next five years,
but only 20% felt highly prepared to address it.

CI can help you look over the horizon and build your business
strategy on data-backed estimates on the market. It can
develop intelligence deliverables to influence strategy at an
operational level to tackle these trends.

It’s no surprise then that industries with long life cycles are
Figure 7: Data-back strategy of CI adopting it as a necessary practice.

Aim for competitive intelligence that warns and predicts what can happen in the future

To be competitive, you need to know yourself first and develop business intelligence

Deliverables should inform your decision making even on an operational level

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4. Conclusion
CI is not only about producing insights.

A 2021 Social Science Research Network study found that organizations were increasingly tracking their
environments and obstacles closely to stay competitive. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it added that CI was providing
a high degree of potential foresight to impact the business’s performances “positively, significantly, and
directly”.

In conclusion, if you are looking to implement CI as a function, make sure you have a learning organization,
think about the results of the insights in practice, know how to integrate them, and understand how to learn
from them.

Don’t hesitate to watch our other webinars to discover how technology can help you harness the power of CI.

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