INSIGHT ON SOCIAL ACTIVIST GROUPS

[Vivek Raghuvanshi]

INSIGHT ON SOCIAL ACTIVIST GROUPS

In today’s operating environment, competitors are using integrated marketing communication to acquire market share.

Competitive Intelligence helps organizations generate early warning by helping organizations interpret competitor’s de-positioning tactics.

Public Relations is a lethal tool of competitive intelligence which organizations use to influence public perception which results in creating a buzz in the market which helps in retaining market share.

Public Relations is a communication tool which motivates behavior resulting in improved market share.

Competitive Intelligence is a tool used to help clients manage issues by combining influences of public attitudes, public perceptions, public behavior and public policy.

This way we see that a simple tool of public relations in competitive intelligence gives a greater RoI which help companies in positioning themselves as a brand.

In the long run it is about incubating a brand and sustaining it and eventually creating a differentiation based on quality, service and competence.

In the normal day to day positioning of organizations, PR helps a company to reposition itself.

Using competitive intelligence, public relations is used to create third party endorsements which results in manipulating public behavior.

What matters is that does the market hold our organization in positive light and this is possible by subtly manipulating market perception using an emotional connect to our brand.

Competitive Intelligence uses poll technique combined with demographic and psychographic profiling based on analysis of information to find out what images and messages will resonate with target audiences to be competitive, organizations monitor competition, spread disinformation and rally citizen groups to raise issues thereby de-positioning competitors in the minds of the wider target audience.

Competitive Intelligence can be used for managing public relations and mitigating crisis and neutralize competitor’s grass roots activist groups. It also helps us identify radicals, opportunists, idealists and realists’ activist groups of competitors which they use to spread this information.

Competitive Intelligence enables us to manage the corporate risks of social activist groups which can be achieved in the following manner i.e. isolating the radicals, cultivating and educating the idealists into realists and finally co-opting the realists. The ‘radicals’ used by competitors may have the agenda of generating political empowerment and social justice that can be marginalized and discredited.

The idealists used by competitors are exposed to reeducation and psychological persuasion using competitive intelligence. Pragmatic realists and opportunists are manipulated through trade-offs and perceptions of “partial victories”.

Competitors manipulate citizen groups and fake grass roots mobilization, in other words it means Astroturfing. Some competitors may use viral marketing techniques but if we have our counterintelligence in place, we can prevent competitors from manipulating market perception.

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