"We don't look at our competitors."

[Jeremy Benjacob-Fuller]

One of my colleagues was on an introduction call recently with a potential new client (a major health insurer), and the responses from them were surprising - shockingly so. Their message was this, "We don't look at our competitors. We look at market trends, and react to those."

My first thought was that we were speaking to the wrong group, but they self identified as the CI function, included a person titled "Director of CI and Market Research", and claimed to be responsible for all research related requests... but that no one at the company ever asked them to look at Competitors.

Now granted, I work in a CI consulting role, so my perspective is skewed by the fact that people who come to me interested in looking at their competitors, but am I missing something here?

Why would a company NOT be interested in having a better understanding of their competition?
For those of you working in an internal CI function, do you see this lack of interest in competitors from your senior leadership also?

[Bryan Doran]

Shouldn't CI ideally be used to help your company (or client company) understand how the competitor is going to react or drive customer behavior? Presumeably, both you and your competitors are doing market research with consumers to understand their needs, wants, desires, and responses to your new products. A company doesn't need a CI function to figure that out, they need CI folks to figure out what their competitors are doing with the same information. How are they going to offer your customers something to get them to switch? How are they going to offer your suppliers, your distributors, etc... something to get them to promote and use more of their product?

CI should be a support function that helps your company prevail over the competition through understanding how your compeition will "differentiate" themselves and what you can do to stop them or "differentiate" yourself from them.