Oregon Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
Networking Event and Wine Tasting
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
5:30PM – 7:30PM
West Café Portland, OR
Program Description
Join us for a fun networking event of wine tasting on February 2nd. We will have a wine tasting featuring award-winning Elk Cove wines and tasty appetizers from West Café’s Kitchen, all so you can network in a cozy, relaxed setting for a winter evening. Whether you enjoy wine or not, this will be a great chance to meet competitive intelligence, market research, and product marketing professionals who make up the membership of the Oregon SCIP chapter – www.sciporegon.com. The cost for this event is $25 per person.
Location
West Cafe
1201 SW Jefferson Street
Portland, OR 97209
Directions
http://www.westcafepdx.com/blog/directions-to-downtown-restaurant/
Registration Fees
SCIP Members – $25.00
Non-Members - $25.00
*Please Note* Registration will close via the web Tuesday, January 26, 2010, USA EST. If you are not able to meet the deadline, you will be able to register on site.
Agenda
Networking Event: 5:30PM – 7:30PM
Contact Information
Sean Campbell, Oregon Chapter Chair email: sean@cascadeinsights.com, 503.631.7552 503.631.7552
Scott Swigart, Oregon Chapter Co-Chair email: scott@cascadeinsights.com, 503.240.1936 503.240.1936
Robyn Reals, SCIP Education Manager, email, rreals@scip.org, 703.739.0696 703.739.0696 x107
Cancellation Policy
Cancellations not received in writing by Tuesday, January 26, 2010, will not be refunded.
Oregon SCIP Network Event and Wine Tasting
February 2 5:30 pm – February 2 7:30 pm
Fun networking event of wine tasting at West Cafe’s Kitchen.
Members:
$25.00
Non-Members:
$25.00
Just wanted to remind you to register for our upcoming event on October 13th.
Registration Link – http://www.scip.org/training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemNumber=8418
The Role of Market Research in Competitive Intelligence
Program Abstract
Join SCIP Oregon for breakfast and a panel discussion about the role of market research in developing a competitive strategy. Get points of view from academia, corporations with dedicated research departments, and mid size to smaller companies where research responsibilities are distributed across the organizations.
This topic will stimulate lively discussion among the panel members and attendees alike. So, plan now to participate with SCIP’s distinguished panel in a forum on The Role of Market Research in Competitive Strategy!
Panelists:
· Rob Wiltbank – Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship, Willamette University and Venture Partner at Buerk Dale Victor LLC
· Daniel Gallagher, Senior Vice President, Research and Discovery, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
· Karen Karger, Marketing Manager – Easystreet
Location:
Jake’s Grill on 10th
611 SW 10th Avenue
Portland, OR 97205
Time:
October 13th at 8am
Cost:
SCIP Members – $30.00
Non-Members - $35.00
Trends in Social Media and Usability that work to your Advantage
Date: Saturday, October 10th, 6-9 PM
Location: Elephant’s Deli Garden Room, 115 NW 22nd, Portland, OR 97210
Presented by: ORSLA
Cost: $30 students, $35 members, $40 non-members
To RSVP, follow this link and answer a few questions about your Web 2.0 use (responses will be kept anonymous):
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ZZZrq31eUFJXSyRNXfZQKg_3d_3d
More about Aaron Schmidt:
Aaron Schmidt is the Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library. He helps plan forward thinking, fun projects for the library, helping them connect to the community and teach them about the Read/Write Web. He also assists with website visioning, conducts usability testing, leads the library’s Library 2.0 Interest Group and helps coordinate and generate ideas for the library’s digital research and development project called DC Library Labs.
He has published articles on social media and libraries in publications such as Library Journal and Online has presented on the topic of library technology and usability throughout the United States, and in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain. In 2005 Schmidt was named a Library Journal "Mover & Shaker." You can find him online at his library technology and usability weblog www.walkingpaper.org.
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I presume you would like to predict your competitors’ moves better than you do now. Say, for instance, their prices. Let’s work on that, perhaps with a surprise, a jolt, or even a shock as we go along.
We structure today’s harangue around a pricing quiz involving simple math. It’s not a math test, and your enjoyment (or not) of this essay doesn’t depend on whether you enjoy math.
Question 1. Your competitor charges $900 for their product. In month 1, they raise their price by 10%. In month 2, they hold their price steady. In month 3, they cut their price by 10%. In month 4, they raise 10%; month 5, hold; month 6, cut 10%; and so on. What is their price at the end of month 30?
Many people say that the competitor’s price will be $900 at the end of month 30. They figure the 10% increases cancel out the 10% decreases. That’s wrong, as we can see at the end of the first three months. Month 1: $900 + 10% = $990. Month 2: $990 + 0% = $990. Month 3: $990 – 10% = $891. It didn’t cancel out.
Answer to question 1. The competitor’s price at the end of month 30 is $814.
Question 2. What will be the competitor’s price at the end of month 31?
We’ll get to the answer in a moment.
The nice thing about patterns is that we can describe them in numbers. The competitor’s price changes +10%, 0%, -10%, +10%, 0%, -10%. We feel validated because history fits the pattern so well. We feel confident because the statistical “explanatory power” is so high; it’s perfect, in this case. We feel we can predict what happens next, as we do with the great ebb and flow of the tides, the majestic rising and setting of the sun, and the news-cycle persistence of a juicy scandal affecting not me.
We shouldn’t feel validated or confident. At least not yet. And we may not yet be ready to predict the competitor’s price.
Answer to question 2. We can say that the competitor’s price will be 10% higher than $814, or $895. That’s what the pattern says, to n decimal places, where n is a number larger than we require. But what’s much more interesting, if we put down our calculators and put on our thinking caps, is to ask and answer question 3.
Question 3. Why has the competitor’s price been rising, holding, falling?
(Did you ask question 3 before you answered question 2? Give yourself a round of applause if you did. I’ve run this quiz with hundreds of managers in workshops I’ve delivered. Everyone turns right away to math. No one asks question 3, at least not out loud. What good is an unasked question?)
We humans do two things with patterns. First, we see patterns. It’s part of how we figure out how the world works. We test perceived patterns with science, we accept perceived patterns as experience, we even enshrine perceived patterns as superstition.
The second thing we do with patterns is assume they will persist. After all, part of what makes a pattern a pattern is that it (seems to) persist. The tides, the sun, the scandals.
Patterns persist when the underlying forces persist. If the moon were destroyed by a Death Star, Earth’s tides would change. Over time Earth’s rotation (and hence the number and duration of sunrises and sunsets) is changing because… well, it’s complicated, and not germane to your competitor’s price. The length of a scandal is projected to rise and fall with the level of a society’s blaminess. Change the moon, Earth’s rotation, or a society’s blaminess, and the tides, sunrises, and scandals will change.
So what’s controlling your competitor’s price? You wouldn’t ignore the world and set your prices according to +10%, 0%, -10%. Neither would your competitor, unless they have turned over control of their prices to a trend-line equation that will next announce $895 in an eerie mechanical monotone.
Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s controlling your competitor’s price is how they make decisions. A strong pattern in prices is likely to mean that your competitor (or you) have linked prices to something. If their suppliers change prices periodically, then your competitor might change its prices to maintain their margins. If your competitor heavily incents its salespeople to make the numbers each quarter, their salesforce might lobby mighty hard for quarter-end price cuts. Or perhaps that’s how you have priced, and your competitor is predicting and responding to changes they expect you to make!
So which is it? Suppliers? Salesforce compensation? Competitive dynamics? Something else? The point is that people, not calendars, control prices.
Notice that the pattern, whatever’s behind it, makes it hard to know what your competitor will do if you make a change. What would happen if you raise or cut your price when you’re “supposed” to hold? Would they follow? If neither you nor they have deviated from the pattern in a while, you have no data to suggest what they will do. You have to understand your competitor, you have to get inside their heads, you have to model their business, you have to figure out why they price as they price.
Sidebar. I’ve run many, many business war games around the world. They always produce surprises (that’s a good thing) for the management teams that participate. Why? Most of those teams have already analyzed their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; what surprises are left? Here’s why I think they get surprised. SWOT analysis mentally places you inside your own company and asks you what you think your competitor will do. A business war game, on the other hand, asks you what you would do if you were your competitor. The latter question explicitly encourages you to look through your competitor’s eyes; the former doesn’t. With the latter you understand them better, you get inside their heads, you model their business, you figure out why they act as they act. End of sidebar.
Intellectually we all know that no one delegates pricing decisions to a calendar. That said, take a look around and see how often people (maybe you and me too) assume patterns will persist. You will see people (maybe you and me too) frame problems in terms of patterns rather than understanding. Listen to pundits, read newspapers, look at analyses.
If you understand your competitors better, you can make better decisions. You can understand better how they will respond if you do this or if you do that. (Do you think they will raise their price to $895 no matter what you do?) Which is, of course, the reason why we try to predict them in the first place. We want to make better decisions for the environment we think we’ll face.
Further reading:
It’s Working!
Precision In, Garbage Out
The Rules
You’re Got the Data. Now What?
Registration Link – http://www.scip.org/training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemNumber=8418
The Role of Market Research in Competitive Intelligence
Join SCIP Oregon for breakfast and a panel discussion about the role of market research in developing a competitive strategy. Get points of view from academia, corporations with dedicated research departments, and mid size to smaller companies where research responsibilities are distributed across the organizations.
This topic will stimulate lively discussion among the panel members and attendees alike. So, plan now to participate with SCIP’s distinguished panel in a forum on The Role of Market Research in Competitive Strategy!
Panelists:
Moderator
I’m looking forward to seeing you all at the Portland Beavers game on the 19th. It looks like we should have a great crowd.
Couple of key points about the event.
If you have any questions before the event or on the day of the event please contact either Scott or I on our cell phones.
Sean – 503 332 5999 / Scott – 503 490 8665
]]>Join us for a fun networking event when the Portland Beavers take on the Iowa Cubs the evening of August 19th. The networking will start at 6:15 and the event will be located in the event area above the left field wall at PGE Park. The cost for this event is $15 per person.
PGE Park
1844 SW Morrison Street
Directions
http://www.pgepark.com/stadium/location
Registration Fees: $15.00 for Members or Non Members.
Registration will close via the web Wednesday, August 12, 2009 (EDT). If you are not able to meet the deadline, you will be able to register on site prior to 6:45pm.
Register here:
http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=7870
Here is the full list.
People Searches:
Emailpattern.com – Look up the pattern that a company uses to assign email addresses. If you know someone’s name, this helps you guess their email.
Pipl.com – look people up by name, email, Web nickname, or phone number. Find out their other contact information and what social networks they’re a part of.
Linkedin.com – Find people for interview recruitment, determine where your employees have gone off to, use saved searches to receive alerts when new people go to work for competitors.
Search Engines
LexisNexis and Factiva are struggeling to index relevant content because they focus on publishing content, which is waning. But, Factiva is only $70 per year, and there’s no additional charge for searching. There is a $2 charge per article to view. People report finding document titles on Factiva and then looking for those exact title with Google to save money.
Clusty is a meta-search engine that groups results into logically related clusters.
Touchgraph visually shows how sites on the Web are related to other sites.
Archive.org – (a.k.a. “The Internet Wayback Machine”) keeps historical copies of Web pages, letting you see what products or services a competitor used to offer, or how their positioning has changed.
Books.google.com, scholar.google.com – Find people who have authored or been interviewed on various topics. Useful to find candidates for qualitative research or subject matter background.
Search for PDF or PPT file types under a company’s site to get more in-depth information. Use wildcards to pick up subsidiaries which are more likely to leak information. For example:
positioning messaging filetype:pdf site:*.somecompany.*/*
www.google.com/alerts – monitor competitors and detect recent news. Often lags breaking news by 24 hours.
bizjournals.com – backend site to all the business journals. Small companies might make lot of news locally, but not show up in Google.
Silobreaker.com – Company information, leadership, connections to other people, news, etc.
Company Info
Finance.yahoo.com – company filings and other statistics, and investor message boards.
Hoovers.com – Company statistics, leadership, jobs, news, competitors, and other background information.
Indeed.com – Search for company job postings across many jobs sites.
Glassdoor.com – Get information, for a company’s employees, about the company moral, culture, strengths and weaknesses, and salaries.
Seekingalpha.com – Has financial information and earnings call transcripts.
Delphion.com – patent search database
Innography.com – A startup with pricing better than Delphion. Lets you search inventors, companies, etc.
footnoted .org – Digs into the footnotes of financial filings
Allconferences.com – lets you know what conferences a competitor will attend as a sponsor or exhibitor.
Other
Web Site Monitoring Tools – A list of Web based and downloadable tools for monitoring Web sites for changes.
Edgar-online.com – Company information, financial filings, and other company information
Twitter – Many competitor employees twitter important news, customer meetings, and other information that won’t show up in formal writings. Said one CI professional, “I’ve been profoundly struck by the things I’ve discovered.”
Tweetdeck, Digsby – let you view and manage your twitter streams. Digsby also integrates with Linked-In.
Slideshare.net – Companies often post product or service pitch decks here.
Fedspending.org – Information about the business a competitor has done with the federal government.
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm – makes “publish or perish” software that uses Google Scholar data to determine citation information.
Thefoundationcenter.org – grant writing research
Quantcast.com – finding traffic and demographics for who’s going to certain web sites. Only works for larger sites.
Software Tools
Traction software – tag articles and send information out daily to the right people in the organization.
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