Merchandising Element Clé De La Distribution

The text is about the growing importance of competitive intelligence as a management practice in the majority of leading companies. Fist of all, the authors defined Competitive Intelligence as the art of collecting, processing and storing information to be made available to people at all levels of the firm. They believe that competitive intelligence is an old management practice and its benefits were detected in lots of countries such as United States of America, Japan, Germany…

They considered information as the centre of the concept of competitive intelligence, and lots of authors and writers tried to distinguish between information and intelligence, and defined information as a serie of numbers, statistics, scattered data about people and companies but intelligence is information that has been filtered, distilled and analysed. For Kahaner (1996) Competitive intelligence requires knowing precisely the differences between information and intelligence. He believes that intelligence is what managers need in order to make decisions.

Deschamps and Ranganath Nayak (1995) categorise three types of competitive intelligence:

- Market Intelligence.

- Competitors’ Intelligence.

- Technological Intelligence.

Otherwise, lots of authors were, interested in the process of competitive intelligence :

- Gates (1999) believes that information is the key to competitive differentiation how it is gathered, managed and used. He believes that Competitive intelligence is supported and driven by technology.

- Fuld (1995) believes that competitive intelligence should build on the culture of an organisation. Intelligence systems are always a human issue.

- Kahaner (1996) states that competitive intelligence is a total process, not just a function in the com- pany. He conceives the competitive intelligence process to be made up of four steps:

o Planning and direction : It is important to understand the user’s need; upon this depends the success of the process

o Collection of data : This step involves collecting the raw data to turn into usable intelligence.

o Analysis : The core element of the process; it turns seemingly unconnected information into intelligence.

o Dissemination : The analyst suggests possible courses of action and distributes it to end users.

At the end of the article, the authors defined 5 types of competitive intelligence attitudes :

- Warrior attitude : The intelligence analyst is very pro-active in managing the competitive intel- ligence process, and continuously on the look-out for opportunities.

- Assault attitude
Also a pro-active field. Intelligence analyst are fre- quently ex-military intelligence specialists

- Active attitude
The intelligence analyst is always looking for stra- tegic information through normal sources, but the company’s information system is not really structured

- Reactive attitude
The intelligence manager responds only when competitors are overtly hostile.


- Sleepers
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