Today’s consumer goods market bustles with both well-known corporate players and nimble new brands attempting to carve out the next great industry competitive advantage. Relying on yesterday’s production, supply chain and sales practices simply won’t cut it. Companies today must marry a wealth of consumer demographic data with larger cultural and social shifts to position…

How do you determine the ideal customer experience for your company? A specific, streamlined plan for addressing customer needs is a valuable tool, especially when laid out an easy-to-decipher visual representation. Customer journey maps touch on a number of customer experience components and areas for improvement in your business. Company-wide changes mean it’s time to…

To run a business, you need to create positive experiences and memories for your customers. So how do you optimize your business operations to create the ideal customer experience? The process begins with a customer journey map, a powerful tool for leaders to make business-critical observations and predictions. A customer journey map can help you…

In the competitive intelligence space, pricing assessments continue to be one of the more frequent requests of CI and marketing functions. These studies tend to be unique in the competitive intelligence space, largely focusing on voluminous quantitative data versus more qualitative insights found in most intelligence studies. With the strategic planning season upon us, we…

Perception studies are becoming go-to research methods that enhance competitive intelligence by including customer perspectives in a particular discussion. In most cases, leadership wants to know what competitors are doing, but customer perceptions can be just as important if not more so. As CI functions look to offer additional capabilities and perspectives, voice of customer…

Win/loss assessments have become a critical input to organizations for their strategic and tactical planning activities. These unique inputs are designed to provide executives with evidence-based insights on what the organization is doing well and where shortcomings exist in an ideally unfiltered manner. “Unfiltered” is often the key requirement for a successful win/loss analysis. All…

Dime-a-dozen strategic business plans carry dime-a-dozen results. When creating their organization’s long-term strategic priorities, too many leaders fall victim to templates lacking the substantive measures needed to steer toward a brighter business future — or any future, for that matter. Worse, others may become overwhelmed with the perceived complexity of the task. Strategic planning’s onus…

No matter what your industry is, you are continually facing new challenges and new competition. The market is constantly changing, which is why you need competitive intelligence (CI) to stay ahead of the pack. What is competitive intelligence, though, and why do you need it to succeed in today’s world? What Is Competitive Intelligence? Competitive…

You already know that your customers are at the heart of your business. The smartest strategists understand that an outstanding customer experience leads to loyalty, brand evangelism and new business. But how can you find out what your customers are really thinking — or what they really need? After all, data only goes so far.…