What Is a Competitive Intelligence Analyst?

Competitive intelligence analysts are researchers and presenters who have an extensive understanding of marketing or business-related fundamentals such as finance. They work closely with management but are particularly instrumental to sales and marketing teams. Their goal is to help their employers be as successful — or ideally, more successful — than competitors.

Defining competitive intelligence helps in understanding the analyst's role. Competitive intelligence refers to any knowledge about a competitor. In theory, when a person has competitive intelligence, he can use it to formulate strategies to gain a competitive advantage.

With the definition of competitive intelligence clear, a competitive intelligence analysts chief responsibility is to gather information about business competitors. To do this, the analyst may visit the competitors' physical and cyber sites, go to trade shows and look at open source materials such as stock publications, product packaging and advertisements and press releases. He may interview customers to find out what motivates them to purchase from the competitor. Two other sources of information are talking with current and former employees of the competitor and price shopping.

A hallmark of the competitive intelligence analyst's work is that he uses only ethical means to obtain his data. He is honest about why he is asking questions or reviewing records and reveals his position as an analyst when it is necessary. He never uses techniques that could be considered espionage such as phone tapping or hacking the competitor's computer network. Everything the analyst collects is public record or volunteered data.

Once the competitive intelligence analyst has collected sufficient data, he reviews it thoroughly from different perspectives. The analysis usually is based on the SWOT concept, which looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities of the party analyzed. By looking at this information, the analyst identifies trends both in the market and the competitor's work to form profiles. However, this process is complex because not all of the data collected bears the same level of significance. The competitive intelligence analyst must identify key success indicators and create matrices that show how much weight each indicator has, which requires both mathematical skills and knowledge of how indicators are wrapped up in operations and the general market.

A company hires a competitive intelligence analyst because it wants to know how to move forward against other businesses and gain increased revenue and profit. Thus, the competitive intelligence analyst's next step is to deliver his knowledge and opinions to members of management. Deadlines for this usually are intense, and in order to create a clean, understandable presentation, the competitive intelligence analyst must be proficient in computer programs capable of creating charts, graphs, spreadsheets and reports.

Because of the nature of their work, most competitive intelligence analysts have a degree related to business, marketing, finance, management, economics or research. Some also have degrees in computer science because of the extent to which competitive intelligence analysts use software programs to store, analyze and present information. Employers expect their competitive intelligence analysts to have all the necessary proficiencies and skills to do their job at the time of hire, so it is fairly rare to find an employer who will accept and train an analyst without one of the aforementioned degrees.