Organizations blame competitors for problems that usually come from within. Effective competitive intelligence starts by understanding your own product, business model, and industry before analyzing rivals. An anecdote about ice cream wars illustrates why internal self-observation matters more than just targeting competitors.
the ICI conference, right? And your topic was, um, competition is the solution. Could you please tell me a little bit about what, what was that all about?
Sure, sure. Well, first, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you to ICI for giving me that opportunity to present. Thank you to SCIP also. I've been a longtime member of SCIP and I love all the content they are providing. Thank you, uh, thank you, Ron, for for this opportunity and the rest. And yeah, for the session I presented, or the presentation I made, it was about that notion of competition is behind failure. Whenever there is a problem in the market, we can't reach some clients or prospects, we target the competition. We think that's the competition, and most often than not, it's not about the competition. It's first about the organization itself. And the whole topic was about demystifying that notion that whenever we have a problem, we can go against the competition. First, we start with our own problems. There's a good saying that says, uh, when there is no enemy within, the enemies outside can do us no harm. And I really believe in that. And So in the session, I was exploring what are the key ingredients for companies who succeed and others failing and why they fail. And the list would be very long, but I tried to mention a few key elements for failure, for success, and how competitive intelligence can help with that. Because it's not just knowing about the competitor, we need to be a good observer of our own organization. For example, for the product, CI people somehow need to know the company's product before going to the competitor's product. It's same for the business, it's same for the industry or the space they are operating in. So yeah, it was about how companies fail, how they can win, and how can competitive intelligence help with that. So this is basically— and there was a good example about ice cream wars.
