Cracking the Competitive Intelligence Code: How Third-Party Data Helps Your Org Gain a Market Advantage

What’s your strategy for uncovering intelligence that can give you an edge in the market? We’ve all experienced the transformative power of data and algorithms when using Google, streaming with Netflix, or shopping on Amazon. But futurist and technology thought leader Bernard Marr highlights that organizations directly interacting  with consumers have a significant data advantage due to the abundance of consumer-generated data..

“Companies in, for example, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, or logistics simply are not going to have millions (or billions) of people signing up to freely share volumes of data … the models of interaction between consumers and the businesses are completely different,” Marr writes. Gaining a market advantage demands diverse types of third-party data to power competitive intelligence (CI) applications.

Unlocking CI insights from a wider variety of data

Blind spots are dangerous, especially when it comes to what your competitors are doing. What data types prove useful for eliminating blind spots and enabling proactive strategies that keep you ahead of your competition? Let’s look at some of them.

1. News data to fuel competition monitoring

Ingesting global print, web, and broadcast news and social commentary expands visibility into what’s being reported on your own brand and your rivals. For global organizations it’s also critical to tap into regional, native language sources since such data can provide more nuanced insights into your competitiveness in different local markets.

Media reports and official announcements about government contract awards can also help you understand what’s happening in your industry, tangential ones, or similar sectors. Plus, news data can provide useful intelligence about consumer preferences, emerging trends, and potentially disruptive events to enable proactive—not reactive—business strategies.

2. Company and financial data to understand the stability of critical third parties.

“AI can now recognize disruptors on the horizon by making connections between embedded characteristics, allowing companies to prepare more effectively for disruptive events,” writes Harvard Business Review.  For many organizations, disruption could be just one failed supplier away. Proactive risk analysis using company financial data can help surface indicators of financial instability, enabling your organization to take steps to mitigate supplier risk. Additionally, financial data can power predictive analytics to enable agile responses in advance of economic downturns.

3. Intellectual property and legal data to track competitive innovation, stay alert to opportunities

What can you learn from intellectual property and legal data? Filings, court cases and more can offer crucial competitive intelligence insights by revealing your competitors’ strategic priorities and innovation trends. With better insights, you can better anticipate market shifts, optimize your own R&D strategies, and identify potential collaboration or litigation risks.

4. ESG ratings and ESG news to evaluate environmental, social and governance performance

The rising attention garnered by environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments means it is no longer strictly a concern for investors. Consumers are paying more attention to ESG factors behind the products they choose and the companies they work for. Regulators around the world are introducing ESG-related requirements. This means you have the dual pressures of needing to know where your competitors are in the ESG landscape and needing to meet your own ESG commitments with innovative products and processes. With ESG ratings and news data, you can benchmark your performance against others, stay alert to emerging trends, regulations, and more.

Sourcing enriched data speeds your time to insight

Making use of big data poses several well-documented challenges. The volume of data, combined with the velocity at which it is created, can feel overwhelming. That’s particularly true because the nature of data. It’s often messy, requiring data scientists to wrangle it into a usable format before it can even be used for advanced analytics.

Nexis^® Data+ is different. First, we license data from global sources of premium and open web content. Then, we convert the aggregated data into clean, semi-structured datasets, available via the flexible Nexis Data+ API.  

This reduces wrangling, allowing you to quickly go from gathering data to using it to power predictive analytics and more. The datasets available offer another big advantage. Enhanced with metadata, index terms and other tags to make it easier to filter out the noise typical in big data, news data is tagged based on more than 3,800 industry terms, allowing you to conduct focused data calls using industry-specific terms rather than building a complicated query.

Data can deliver a competitive advantage. As data analytics expert Leon Gordon writes in Forbes, “When your competitors are flying blind with no way of knowing if they are making the right choices or not, you can move ahead by using analytics and big data to reveal hidden insights about customers and markets that will help you drive growth in your company.”

Is it time for you to expand the data that fuels your competitive intelligence analytics?

Talk with a Nexis Data+ expert to learn more.

Not ready to integrate data directly? Check out Nexis+ AI™, a company research solution designed to speed your time to insight.