Competitor Research
Competitor Research in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This research provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor research into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Competitor research is an essential component of corporate strategy. It is argued that most firms do not conduct this type of research systematically enough. Instead, many enterprises operate on what is called informal impressions, conjectures, and intuition gained through the tidbits of information about competitors every manager continually receives. As a result, traditional environmental scanning places many firms at risk of dangerous competitive blindspots due to a lack of robust competitor research.