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www.cistream.com/post/52743039568/understanding-social-competitive-threats-and-new

Understanding Social Competitive Threats and New Disruptive Forces with Social Intelligence is Critical to the Corporation


by Vince Schiavone, CEO, ListenLogic

As the world approaches a complete “digital state” the competitive threats and disruptive forces against corporations has never been greater. This growing competition and disruption comes from a variety of fronts and not only from traditional corporations offering alternative products or services. With the widespread adoption of social media, competitive forces attempting to erode market share and disrupt markets are emerging against the enterprise across nearly every industry.

Many leading companies and brands looking to gain competitive advantages over their traditional corporate competitors, emerging disruptive competitors and even activist forces are turning to advanced social intelligence to receive deep, multidimensional insight on the behaviors, tactics and objectives of these operations.

Traditional Competitive Threats

Companies today are able to understand their traditional competitors better than ever before. With the adoption of advanced “big data” processing and complex concept modeling, companies can now gain powerful visibility into the forces that directly impact their business, their competitors and understand the actions and results of those competitors in real-time.

Five major areas where leading brands are focusing their competitive understanding through advanced social intelligence include:

Competitive Path-to-Purchase: Brands can know map the customer journey and path-to-purchase for their competitors to understand the demand moments and decisions drivers for shoppers and consumers. They’re then able to counter the strengths or exploit the weaknesses of the competing product or service in order to enhance the positioning of their own offering.

Switching Triggers: Customers opt to switch to and from products regularly. Brands investing in understanding the specific triggers of these switching decisions, which can range from quality and service to features and pricing, are able to strategically position their offering’s features and benefits to direct switching to their own products.

Unmet Needs: Millions of shoppers and consumers discuss their unmet needs, both openly and inadvertently, across the open social universe everyday. Smart brands are identifying and understanding these needs to convert them into opportunities through product innovation, feature introductions or new market entries, all to address the unmet needs of consumers.

Customer Personas: Customers of competitors can be constructed to understand their motivations, attitudes, behaviors and actions, as well as interests, to not only learn how to attract them, but also when and where to engage them.

Feature Sentiment: Sentiment is not a new aspect of traditional social monitoring, however with advanced technology, sentiment can now identified in a highly specific and actionable approach. In fact, sentiment can be identified on specific aspects and features like how shoppers and consumers feel about specific packaging, messaging or ingredients.

Emerging Market Disruptors

Today, with the proliferation of mobile technology and social broadcasting, competition is no longer limited to large, traditional competitors or the motivation to take market share. Companies and brands now have to strategically address emerging competitors, as well as disruptive forces aggressively targeting them across the open social universe.

The objectives of these emerging competitive threats are often to dramatically disrupt the market to damage, if not destroy it and its leaders to position their brand’s solution as the premier alternative.

One example of these emerging disruptors is SodaStream which targeting the carbonated beverage industry with their home carbonated beverage machines. SodaStream’s focus is to disrupt the traditional soda beverage market by convincing consumers to make their own carbonated beverages at home. One of SodaStream’s major tactics is to focus on their product’s elimination of plastic bottles, which they target as an environmental threat.

Creating Disruption with Activists

To further achieve this disruption, SodaStream partnered with Alex Bogusky, former co-chairman of ad agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, which ironically created ads for Coke Zero under his tenure. Now an activist against the beverage industry, Bogusky is known for developing activist campaigns against the industry like his viral video chastising his former client, Coca-Cola, using their ad campaign polar bears to make a statement on the health effects of soda consumption.

SodaStream relied on Bogusky to create their Super Bowl ad targeting soda manufacturers for the amount of plastic bottles they produce. The ad directly attacks the beverage industry’s market leaders with exploding bottles as consumers use SodaStream’s product.

Bogusky’s activism approach delivers SodaStream a direct aggressive channel that many large, traditional competitors would not employ. Bogusky also affords SodaStream the opportunity to leverage his extensive, sympathetic social network which features a wide array of activists targeting a variety causes against the beverage industry’s leading providers, ranging from portion size, bottle elimination and sugars to soda taxes and an array of health issues. This network spans activists and advocates across the media, academic, health and corporate sectors, which Bogusky leverages to bring further pressure against the beverage market’s leaders, providing a greater advantage for SodaStream.

Mapping these activist relationships unveils a massive “stealth” network, that are often working in concert against the corporation sometimes in partnership with an emerging disruptive competitor, like SodaStream. The example below unveils Bogusky’s massive sympathetic activist network targeting the beverage industry, which provides a collective reach to tens of millions of consumers.




Despite their differing causes against the beverage industry, most of these individual activists share a common objective to damage or even destroy the major providers of carbonated beverages, a shared objective with their disruptive competitor SodaStream.

The complexity of these competitive forces is difficult to pinpoint and understand. However, as companies are now faced with the critical need to gain insight into these new types of veiled, aggressive competitive threats, more enterprises are turning to advanced social intelligence to identify, map and track them individually and collectively to help guide their strategic direction and decisions.

Achieving Advance Competitive Intelligence

No longer are corporations faced with only traditional, direct competitors. Rather, companies have to understand the emerging disruptive competitors that will often join forces with individual aggressive activists and their massive sympathetic networks to damage their business and disrupt their industry.

To gain this type of advanced insight on a corporations traditional and disruptive competitors and well as the activists working in concert to damage them, the organization needs the ability to filter, classify and analyze billions of daily open social discussions to extract invaluable on-going insight. This insight delivers multidimensional competitive views previously unavailable to the corporation to drive strategic decision-making.

Select references in this piece are used with permission from the book Social Business Intelligence: Reducing Risk, Building Brands and Driving Growth with Social Media (2013, Ascendigm Press).

This advanced social intelligence facilitates proactive planning and strategic response to effectively combat these competitive forces. This is why achieving advanced competitive intelligence is critical for corporations to achieve, to not only grow, but also protect their organizations, employees, market share and even industries.