3 Market Landscape Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Businesses of all kinds, across all sectors and industries need accurate market and competitive intelligence to respond nimbly to the dynamics at play in their space — and hopefully gain a competitive advantage. The need for accurate and timely intelligence grows even more when market conditions turn for the worse and the future outlook becomes murky.

However, competitive and market intelligence professionals must overcome three common challenges — best these, and your intelligence operations run smoothly, with colleagues learning crucial information about competitors and markets, allowing them to act in the moment with the latest information, and beat the odds.

Related Reading: 8 Tools to Level Up Your Market Analysis in 2023

How to Conduct a Comprehensive Competitive Landscape Analysis

Difficulty Quickly Identifying Key Insights

All good intelligence starts with a robust process, supported by critical technology. Without either of these, it is likely the intelligence-gathering tasks take too long and the team is too slow to capitalize on any crucial market or competitive opportunities.

The real problem here is to gather really valuable intelligence, it requires the painstaking approach of sifting line by line through content or relying on CTRL+F to search single keywords. To make matters worse, the deluge of information that needs to be analyzed grows and grows. With lots of time already taken to gather snippets of partial information, you have no choice but to declare the gathering over and infer as best you can the signal from the noise.

The solution lies in leveraging AI technology to help you efficiently and confidently gather exactly the right information you need.

Here is what the solution could look like:

1. AI-powered search: the ability to leverage the power of AI to rapidly and accurately search across all content in one go. Ideally, any AI-powered search engine is equipped to search not only the specific keyword, but also synonyms and understanding the search intent. This allows the person searching to skip the pitfalls of CTRL+F’ing their way through content but instead only the relevant information is automatically surfaced.
2. Consumer-grade UX: any technology you choose should also be easy to adopt and use. This is especially important when the market and competitive conditions require timely intelligence and a collaborative environment.

Lack of Access to the Right Content

In order for downstream colleagues to benefit from the market and competitive intelligence you gather, the intelligence itself needs to be accurate and timely. Without access to valuable content sources, all in one place, the intelligence outputs lack the authority and gravitas to truly move the needle.

The unfortunate reality is that there’s typically never a silver bullet single document that gives you the insights you need, but instead, the insights lie in a comprehensive and aggregate analysis covering the given industry or company.

The real issue lies in the fact that competitive and market intelligence teams rely on ubiquitous, analogous, and publicly available information, like websites, and social media feeds. These can be useful, but they often lack the important details, leaving the competitive or market intelligence professional to infer the meaning or strategy behind the information. And because the sources are analogous, any meaningful validation of the insights and meaning is impossible. The intelligence exercise then becomes more art than science, leaving big holes in your understanding, and ultimately diluting any impact.

The solution is to gain access to differentiated and valuable content sources, all in one platform. This gives you a competitive advantage, confidence, and adds credibility to the intelligence you share.

Related Reading: An Innovator’s Guide to Competitive Intelligence

Here is what the solution could look like:

1. All valuable content in one place: gaining access to all the valuable content sources in one place, helps drive efficient and accurate intelligence gathering. Ideally, these content sources are differentiated and address the four voices necessary to give a comprehensive analysis, as well as provide enough variety to validate your findings.
2. Content with data: ideally you gain access to content that also contains detailed data around a company or market, such as broker research.

Inability to Find Truly Groundbreaking Insights

Even if you overcome the first two challenges with an efficient way to search through valuable content, there is simply not enough time to accurately identify trends across a market, or for a company in enough meaningful detail. This type of bigger picture insight adds an extra dimension to your intelligence.

The real issue is there is too much information to accurately comprehend, and be able to spot trends and insights that only become clear when massive amounts of information are consumed. Without these bigger picture insights, your intelligence might be directionally accurate but lack an overall grounding to truly spot a market or competitive weakness or strength.

With AI-powered technology, the bigger picture at the market and company level can easily be seen. Helping support your overall intelligence, and adding critical context to the collective understanding of why something is happening.

The solution could take many forms, but here are a couple:

Topic modules: these leverage AI, to visualize trending topics at the market or company level. Ideally, they have many layers, helping you clearly see what is driving company performance, or which companies in a market are impacted by a trend over others.

Sentiment analysis: hidden within documents are key clues as to the meaning behind the words. By leveraging AI, the sentiment can easily be seen, and the true meaning unlocked. This can be especially useful with documents the company themselves release.

The good news: these three challenges are solvable, and for the teams that go on to remedy them, the speed, depth, and big picture context added to their intelligence will supercharge the entire organization from the C-suite, right down to the individual contributors.

To read more about market landscape best practices, check out our white paper, How to Modernize Your Market Landscape Analysis & Due Diligence.