How to Develop Your Competitive Intelligence

Circulation Management, July 1, 2003

Byline: ELAINE TYSON

Someone once told me that even paranoid people have enemies. When I first heard this adage, I laughed, but once I started thinking about it, I realized that it's true.

While you probably aren't more paranoid than anyone else when it comes to your competitors, we all need to keep an eye on them for a number of reasons. First, of course, is that monitoring competitors' activities is helpful when it comes to honing your own circulation strategies.

I'll never forget sitting in my office one afternoon, going through the mail, and discovering a sweepstakes offer from our biggest competitor. This company had never mailed a sweeps before. What would it mean for our magazine? What did it say about our competition's circulation situation? Our direct mail campaign was ready to drop and there was nothing we could do to change it. Not only did our competition beat us into the mail with its fall campaign, the sweepstakes offer might have destroyed response to our mailing. It was a very uncomfortable few weeks.

As it turned out, the sweeps promotion was this competitor's last-ditch effort to sell enough subscriptions to meet rate base. That didn't happen, and the magazine was subsequently sold and folded into another competitor's circulation. But because I saw the mailing, I was able to alert my company that something was up.

There are many ways to find out about competitors. Some are basic, but easy to overlook. Here are a few to help you with your detective work:

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Subscribe to competitors' publications. As a subscriber to competitors' magazines, you'll develop a snapshot of each circulation operation. When you subscribe, always check the bill-me later option, and when the invoices start coming, don't pay right away. You'll get a first-hand look at how many credit copies are sent, as well as each billing series. You'll also be able to determine if a third-party collection service is used. After you finally pay one of the last invoices, wait until the last renewal notice reaches your mailbox before you renew. This way you can collect each competitor's renewal series. Check everything you receive to find out what offers are being made, whether the subscription price is going up or down or if a premium is being offered late in the series.

I recommend subscribing to competitors' magazines under a unique variation of your name, which gives you the opportunity to discover who rents competitors' subscription lists. This knowledge might spark some new ideas about promoting your own list rentals or suggest mailing lists that you might want to test. You can also learn how subscribers are treated by developing "problems" with your subscriptions and calling the customer service numbers for help.

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Attend functions where your competitors are speaking. People sometimes reveal amazing things in their presentations. At the very least, you'll gain a better understanding of competitive organizations' strategies and goals. And, it might actually be fun. I once witnessed an argument between two circulators from the same company during a panel discussion. The argument involved returns from recent gift promotions and which publication got the better response. Those response figures were revealed in the heat of the moment, and I was happy to write them down to see how my magazine's gift promotion measured up.

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Look to suppliers to get more information about competitors. While this doesn't always work, more than once I've looked at printing samples from vendors and picked out those from my competitors to review.

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Look for any available promotional materials from your competitors. Materials can include space advertising, card decks or email promotions. Note the date that you or a co-worker received the information, and file it away for future reference.

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Read the trade press. While this should be a given, check everything that hits your desk quickly, or you're likely to be the last to know that your biggest competitor just bought the circulation list of a magazine that ceased publication. Interviews with competitors' employees can also be revealing in terms of corporate strategies and new activities that might affect your company's plans.

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Always listen. Industry events are an excellent place to pick up scuttlebutt, as are elevators. No, really. I once worked for a company that was located in the same building as another major publisher that owned competitive titles. I overheard two people discussing that one of our competitors wasn't doing very well financially and its publisher had just resigned. I got off the elevator, went back to my office and repeated the conversation to the vice president of circulation, and suggested that we consider buying that magazine, since it had been giving us trouble for years. Turns out that the rumors were true, and the magazine was shuttered within six months. While the company I worked for didn't buy it, knowing that there was a problem with this competitor gave us time to light a fire under our own ad sales and circulation marketing efforts. The moral is not to reveal confidential information in elevators, but do listen to others.