Are you a gold-mine for the intelligence gatherers?
Exhibitions are not only a showcase for companies to put their best face forward to customers – they are a potential mine of information about new products, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures – everything your competitors would love to know about you. Mark Rowe talks to a competitive intelligence consultant about the two sides of the coin – finding out, lawfully, about the competition; and defending against those efforts when they’re aimed at you.
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Intelligence-gatherers don’t need to steal your briefcase or break into your premises to find out about you, says Paul Stretton-Stephens of Open Door Consulting. There are legal sources to obtain information, and ethical techniques to gather information, that could save your company from a competitor, he says. "We work on the premise, and our clients seem to like this – because we know how to gather intelligence we know how to protect it. There are some consultancies out there and all they are producing is marketing intelligence, and there is a distinction. Competitive intelligence looks at all aspects of the business that enable the business to function. So you look at suppliers, distributors, distribution channels, couriers, media campaigns, analysts, customers, and public relations. And I hasten to add it is all open information. Once all these snippets of information have been collected and analysed we can then produce competitive intelligence or as we at Open Door refer to it ‘ ‘Ready2Use Intelligence’. We belong to the SCIP [the US-based Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, with UK and Irish chapters]. We abide by their code of ethics in that we don’t misrepresent ourselves. We are totally above board. It’s something very much to stress." You can read the SCIP code of ethics on the website www.scip.org. It includes: "to comply with all applicable laws, domestic and international", "to accurately disclose all relevant information, including one’s identity and organization, prior to all interviews" and "to fully respect all requests for confidentiality of information". Open Door signs a confidentiality agreement with all clients. Paul Stretton-Stephens makes the point that CI is a human process, "1) for the actual primary intelligence gathering and 2) for the analysis". It’s a question of putting questions to people, using phrases such as "we have heard that -" and "there are rumours that -". Paul Stretton-Stephens adds: "And people talk to you." What do clients seeking CI want to hear about’ "When we gather intelligence for a client, nine times out of ten they want to know about competitor activities. That’s the main pursuit. Now 90 per cent of information is open, public source information. The ten per cent that isn’t, is protected by intellectual property law et cetera. Anybody who gathers that and then uses it is breaching the law, therefore that information is worthless, they have the risk of the full weight of the law upon them and rightly so. We gather meaningful intelligence that our clients can use. For example, a lot of regions have a local business newspaper and somebody might have won an award. All the companies associated with that particular company put an advert in – ‘congratulations, we have been associated with you for ten years’. For CI professionals that is a gold mine. It’s all their suppliers, and distributors. That is one way we can find leads." A client might or might not have a specific CI wish-list: one client may feel they are too busy working on their own business to stay up to date with what their rivals are getting up to, while another client may have heard rumours of a competitor’s soon to be introduced new product, and what can the CI consultant find out about it. "We had a client who was in a declining industry, shall we say, for their particular product. Their competitor, they felt, was also in this declining industry – however, our client was losing workers to the competitor, and he couldn’t understand why. So they wanted us to find out. The competitor had found a new market abroad in a Third World country, so he was taking on workers because he was selling more. Not only did we find where they were selling the product, we also found a new market for our clients and actually stopped the firm from going under. A marketing research or marketing intelligence company couldn’t have achieved that." The other side of the CI coin is, in this case, the company with the Third World market seeking to keep its lead to itself. "We call that competitive assurance, otherwise termed as competitive counter-measures or competitive counter-intelligence. Many companies know the risks of divulging information unwittingly, and they have policies and procedures in place to prevent the staff there giving their names, so they can’t be approached outside the workplace by representatives of the competitors. Companies put a lot of money into physical security, into policies and procedures within the company, but without actually understanding competitive intelligence and the methods employed. There are unscrupulous companies around and we have come across them performing various tasks and I have to say that not all of them play by the rules – that’s where the protection of your valuable proprietary information really comes into play." Open Door offer business penetration testing. A client knows they have information that needs to be protected; are they vulnerable’ While every project is unique, in outline the consultant will look at the client’s competitors and seek to find what methods competitors are using to gain intelligence. What are the competitors’ CI capabilities; if the capabilities are nil, are they out-sourcing’ Next, unannounced, Open Door will attack their client as if in search of CI. "We report to the client and together we develop and employ the most appropriate counter-measures. And after a period of time we re-test. It’s a very effective way for our client to say, ‘we have a new project that we want to keep under wraps, we think we have put all the security in place, but we want to test it’." That test can be purely human, or purely electronic (network intrusion, also known as ‘ethical hacking’) or a combination of the two." During that test, if the consultant finds that a competitor is trying to penetrate the client too, maybe by ‘waste archaeology’ (going through your black bin liners of used paper) or contacts with employees. Open Door reports to the client and there is, more often than not, the option of exploiting the situation and creating an opportunity. Paul Stretton-Stephens feels that CI is not appreciated enough in the UK, and that we are lagging behind. "Now we are in a competitive world and a lot of people say, ‘does this really go on” and it does. This happens all the time. We have companies from overseas, from the UK, saying for example ‘we have a competitor in the Far East who is counterfeiting our product, we want to know how much we are losing in the Far East’. We have people in the Far East who can find competitive intelligence about counterfeit goods. That is worth a lot of money to our clients. CI really is about risk management." Education and awareness is the key, he feels. The SCIP says it has about 7,000 members worldwide, a rise of 30 per cent in a year, itself a suggestion that appreciation of CI is increasing. The sixth annual SCIP European conference runs from October 24 to 26 at the Park Hilton Hotel, Munich, Germany. At the society’s recent international conference in Seattle, a survey of attendees found that 37 per cent of requests for them to gather CI came from the marketing department, and 35 per cent from sales. More than half, 57 per cent, of CI teams are outsourcing their work. When asked if requests for CI had gone up in the past year, 81 per cent said yes. CI – the gathering of it for you to use, and the preventing of rivals from gathering any – happens in every walk of life and no doubt has always happened. General Custer could have done with some before the Battle of Little Big Horn; in sport, knowing your opponent’s weaknesses, or even knowing what your opponent knows about your weaknesses, can be the difference between winning and losing (see separate article). Of more direct interest to the security manager, however, is the fact that the computer revolution means that information about your organisation is in ever more hands in ever smaller, more portable pieces of hardware. Executives are able to take laptops home, and on journeys. Wittingly or unwittingly, those execs are at risk of giving nuggets to the competitive intelligence gatherers.
