Important benefits you can get from competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence is a big business. Recent studies showed that 89% of the participants recognize competitive intelligence as a strategic asset, a must-have. But why?

What are the benefits of competitive intelligence? Can it help you improve your product? Increase your customer satisfaction? How can it benefit your strategy to know your competitors? In this article, you will discover the importance of competitor analysis.

No more guessing

Making assumptions is bad in business because often, assumptions are wrong. And they can take an awful turn on business. By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you will get accurate and factual data about your competitors and market.

Find new opportunities.

Knowing your competitor’s weaknesses may instigate ideas for improvements of your service or product offerings and bring innovative ideas towards improvement. You will discover what they are doing wrong, how to avoid such and ways they can improve and use it to your advantage. Ideas can never run out when you commit to constant learning. This is one of the benefits of competitive intelligence. You will get to discover many untapped opportunities. You can focus more on efficiently solving customers’ unmet needs. If you want to improve your service and product offerings of your business, then you have to conduct competitive analysis regularly. This will indicate where your business needs improvement in terms of product or service performance, company policy or customer communication.

Recent technological advances combine apparel technology and textile industry to develop smart wearable devices. More and more customers use those smart wearable devices on a daily base. These have the capability to interact with the user or the environment, including tracking and communicating data about the user or the environment to other devices through embedded sensors and conductive yarns. If you are in textile or fashion, it can be important to take a closer look to this segment. A not so common example of smart wearable devices is the hydra t-shirt.

Do what you do best, even better.

Knowing the main reasons why your loyal customers do business with you instead of your competition is the importance of competitive intelligence. You should keep your weaknesses in mind but it is more important to focus on your strengths. Use your business’s competitive advantage and apply it efficiently to win more customers.

The market of the smartwatches providers can be divided in 4 segments: leading consumer electronics brands, fashion and traditional watch brands, children’s watches, as well as special-purpose brands and startups that cater to niche audiences. The traditional watch brands has to make a strategic choice and they listen to their customers.

“Traditional watch brands such as Fossil and Casio will gain market share by offering more style and choice in their portfolio than the technology brands,” said Mr. Antin. “We think that fashion and traditional watch brands are likely to account for up to 20 percent of unit shipments by 2022.”[i]

See the bigger picture.

The market is usually excited about new features and latest trends; these attract even potential customers and prevent the loyal ones from leaving. By learning about other businesses, technologies, and buzz in your market, you can discover the latest trends. See if you can incorporate it into your products and services innovatively.

If you are a designer or company in the textile tech industry competitive intelligence will reveal which technologies your competitors have or have not implemented. For instance, did you know that utilising blockchain solutions gains popularity over the cloak and dagger approach to manufacturing within the textile and fashion industry? Many companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to change their usual methods from consumers demanding transparency and asking #WhoMadeMyClothes?

Get started!

The benefits of gaining systematical competitive intelligence seem clear. You want to make strategic decisions substantiated with (f)actual data, find out what we can do for you.

If you also want to contribute to a more sustainable future in portable technology, e-textiles, and smart textiles, sign up (https://wearsustain.eu/dashboards/home?email=)

[i] https://www.wearable-technologies.com/2018/12/wearable-device-sales-will-grow-26-percent-worldwide-in-2019-says-research-company-gartner/