TrainingBriefs® Gathering Competitive Information

Ethics concern an individual's moral judgments about right and wrong. Decisions taken within an organization may be made by individuals or groups, but whoever makes them will be influenced by the culture of the company. One area of concern within many organizations is the gathering of competitive information. Collecting information about your competitors makes good business sense. However, you must do so in an ethical and reasonable way. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. If you ever find yourself in this situation, it helps to know how to act.

There are many reasons why you might want to gather competitive intelligence about one of your competitors. Competitive intelligence gives you hard facts on which to base decisions about marketing tactics, R&D investments, product launches, and overall business strategy. Effective gathering of competitive intelligence can easily be done using legal and ethical sources of information.