 AWARE Help & Support
Competitive & Marketing Intelligence Help
Although books and the web are useful for finding information, occasionally it can be difficult to find the answer - especially when the question is specific to a particular CI issue - perhaps applying something described theoretically to a real situation.
Our CI & Marketing Help service - where you can ask a question and get answered by a marketing & competitive intelligence expert - is provided for just these circumstances. We will answer your question for free if it intrigues us or does not require extensive research time or effort. (Note: Terms and Conditions apply - we may refuse to answer questions that we believe could involve illegal or unethical practices. We also will not spend time researching complex questions in the free service - although we will generally try and give pointers to how to do the research. Also, whereas we will guarantee confidentiality for our paid services, we reserve the right to include our answers to free questions as part of our FAQs or in articles we may write).
Over the years, we have been asked for help on a variety of CI related issues. Often we get asked the same question again and again - in different guises. Questions range from topics such as how to find pricing information and what is SWOT, PEST and Value Chain Analysis to queries on what is the difference between knowledge management, competitor intelligence and competitive intelligence and detailed requests for help with competitor strategy. We've collected some of these questions and included our response and you may find the solution on our Frequently Asked Questions pages.
Finally, we include a series of articles, tips and ideas on better practice. These have been published on our pages as a Quick Tip from the right column on many of our site pages, or are selected from our marketing tips newsletter and blog, and cover CI, marketing and general business management issues.
Our Help & Support pages are aimed at supplementing our CI Resources pages, which include a list of recommended web-sites for finding CI, and suggested books on CI and marketing for learning more.
Use our pages to help your competitive intelligence effort, and feel free to use the ideas you find here. Just do us the favour of saying where you found them or linking to us from your own web-site.
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Quick Tip: Questions
Quick Tip
A key competitive intelligence skill is the ability to distinguish what you do know from what you don't know. The effort is then to find out sources for the unknown information - as the great English writer, Dr Samuel Johnson said:
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Unfortunately even with the knowledge there can be problems. Lewis Branscomb - the US physicist and Harvard management professor once said:
People rarely distinguish among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. But they are as different from each other and as interlocking as starch molecules, flour, bread, and the flavorful memory of a superb morning croissant.
The aim of competitive & marketing intelligence is to turn data into something that can lead to competitive advantage in the same way that your morning croissant or loaf of bread depends on flour and water interacting to make something that is more than just a mixture of the raw ingredients.
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