"A well structured, informative view of how competitive intelligence can be used to better target preferred customers to improve the bottom line. The winning of customer and market share is becoming increasingly difficult in business today, and winning the right sort of customers from ever more aggressive competition is even harder. This book will help you understand the many issues involved and help you formulate appropriate strategies to improve business results."
— Ian Brown, Senior Market Analyst & Strategist, BT Government Marketing, British Telecom plc.
"The new marketplace challenge of observing competitors' practices and combining relationship marketing strategies has been made practical by Ian Gordon's new book. A must-read for any marketing professional."
— Rogers Turner Jr., Senior Manager, Relationship Marketing, Williams Communications
"In the fast-paced new economy, Competitor Targeting can help leaders maintain their market share and can allow the underdog to chip away at the gorilla's foothold. The techniques and insights in Competitor Targeting on how to weaken a competitor's chain of relationships, take uncontested territory, operate below the radar, and anticipate an attack from your competitors can allow a company to gain key insights, strengthen its position in the marketplace, and ultimately win more business."
— Rob Lalonde, Senior VP Products, Delano Technology
"In an era which competitors are often in the same channel or alliance as your own company, identifying and defeating those competitors has never been more complex. As Competitor Targeting demonstrates, competitive intelligence has evolved from simple information gathering into a sophisticated discipline. Practised as Mr. Gordon outlines, it will enable you to defeat your competitors, not only by learning more about them, but by understanding and responding to what your customers— who are your competitors' customers— value most about them."
— Stephen Bernhut, Editor, Business Journal
Product Description
Understanding and beating competitors is more challenging today than ever. The battlefield is complex, the adversaries are plentiful, and competitors are increasingly fast, flexible, and difficult to analyze and predict. In today's crowded marketplace, everyone seems to want loyalty from the same customers.
Many companies have taken their eye off the ball of competition in recent years and have instead invested heavily in Customer Relationship Management and related CRM technology. While this strategy of putting the customer at the center of the organization is valuable, it is equally important to keep a keen eye on the competition. In this environment, being focused on customers alone may not be enough to help the company succeed, and it may even be perilous.
It is still possible— in fact, essential— to identify who to beat and how. Just as a rising tide raises all ships, so does strong marketplace demand mask a company's competitve weaknesses. But when the economy softens, the absence of a meaningful competitive strategy can become all too apparent when competitors try to grow at your expense.
Competitor Targeting: Winning the Battle for Market and Customer Share is where competitive intelligence meets CRM. It shows you how to target competitors and increase your share of the customers you value most by combining customer relationship management and competitive intelligence principles. Winning in today's market means beating the competition not just at the traditional things such as price, or securing an order. Now beating the competition involves creating superior relationships with your customers— better, faster, and more enduring than your competitors can do it.
Competitor Targeting shows:
- how to choose the right competitors to beat
- how to plan to beat or collaborate with them
- how to move beyond traditional competitive intelligence gathering and monitoring, to make competition central to your business strategy
- how to integrate strategies for bonding with customers and beating competitors
- how to ensure that your competitors lose so that you may win, customer by customer.
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