TMCnet News
Spying on competitors: Is this legal?(Daily Financial Times (Sri Lanka) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Intelligent marketing starts with market intelligence. Only with valid, current information can you overpower competition and grow. But do all marketers have access to competitor information? The newspapers are full of competitor information. News of product launches, seasonal offers, corporate initiatives, CSR campaigns, etc. They reveal much about each competitor's plans. An intelligent marketer will find this news very useful indeed. And since its published information it is in the public domain and therefore completely legal. Any marketing plan that does not take into account the intent and ambitions of competitors is sure to run into trouble, sooner or later. Most intelligent marketers already go to great lengths to obtain competitor and market information, but they have inadvertently perhaps, overlooked newspapers as an inexpensive and easy to access source of valuable competitor information. Lanka Monitoring Agency (LMA), a relative newcomer, provides a unique service that couples a daily media tracking service with a live web archive. It tracks, sorts, scans and delivers by email ads and articles appearing in 53 newspapers before noon the same day. It does the same for 12 TV channels and 43 radio channels as well. Currently it tracks banking, leasing and finance, education, insurance, automotive, FMCG and telecom sectors. In addition, it tracks and catalogues all news relevant to each sector including state and departmental announcements. While other companies, among them the global giant AC Nielsen, and local pioneer Survey Research Lanka, offer similar services, only LMA currently delivers daily and maintains a live web archive. Easy to access and use, LMA's live archive is what makes this service worthy of notice. To ensure large attachments don't jam up clients' email inboxes only a contents page listing captions of ads and articles of that day is emailed. Clicking a relevant caption opens the scanned ad or article in a web browser such as Explorer or Firefox. Before cross indexing by date and publication, all articles and ads are categorised and subcategorised by company, product and product variant. But that's only to facilitate the true functionality of this supremely convenient tool. A user can select any company, specify a product or product variant, choose a period and, with one click get an analysis of activity, compare it with other players in the market and get this find out the value of all ads and articles carried by one or all competitors for any period! The prices are reasonable but vary depending on the sector and clients requirements. The varying costs cover that of daily delivery service, live web archive and use of analytical tools. |