Writing a competitive news briefing that helps everyone keep their cool

This presentation was delivered by Alex McDonnell, Market, and Competitive Intelligence Lead at Airtable at the Competitive Intelligence Summit, 2022. Catch up with a variety of talks with our OnDemand service.

Hey! I’m Alex McDonnell from Airtable, speaking to you from Toronto, Canada.

You’re here because you’re the go-to person at your organization for all things competition, or you soon will be. When a competitor drops some major news about say a new product launch or a major acquisition, that’s your time to shine and help the organization make some sense of it.

But it's not always so easy. Sometimes competitive news can cause panic. Other times it gets dismissed completely. How do we navigate that? How can we help our organizations process competitive news while keeping their cool?

I'm gonna do my best to give you the tools to do just that. You're gonna learn from all the mistakes that I've made running three in-house competitive intel functions over the last nine years.

In this article, I’ll specifically be focusing on:

You know you have a problem when…

… you recognize the chat below. Whether it's on Slack, Teams, or whatever chat channels you use at work, somebody drops a link to some competitor news with a message like, “Have we seen this?” or “Did we catch this?” and you get extreme reactions one way or the other.

A pretend Slack conversation between three co-workers. The first from someone called Skyler who has sent a link with the caption "Have we seen this?", then a reply which is competitor dismissive from Finley that says "Whatever, this is going to suck!" and then a competitor obsessed response that says "This is not good news, thats our main differentiator right now... I'm freaking out!" This interaction is labelled the "Link and stink".

You might see competitor-dismissive reactions, where your colleagues aren’t paying enough attention to what the competitor is doing or thinking about how we might be able to learn. That sounds like, “Who cares?! That product’s gonna suck!”

Alternatively, you might see competitor-obsessed reactions, where they panic about every little thing without putting any of it into context. “This is not good news! They're closing in on our differentiators. I'm totally freaking out!”

Just dropping the link to some competitor news, with no context or no takeaways, creates these extreme reactions. This isn’t constructive and doesn’t help anybody. That's why we call it “the link and stink”.

I've been there. It still happens – people post the link to something that they've just seen, and an emotional reaction ensues. It's on us as competitive intelligence pros to help the organization make sense of this news in a more constructive way.

Crucial competitive intelligence principles

To help us on our mission to eliminate the link and stink, I want to offer a few helpful CI principles that I've had to learn the hard way.

Shout-out to Jason Oakley from Klue for this one. He put out a LinkedIn post explaining that it doesn’t matter if you’re the first one to share competitive news. The important thing is that you can help make sense of it.

Sure, it feels nice if you're the one to say, “Hey, we just picked up this news and the full briefing is coming.” It makes you feel like you're on the pulse of market changes, but you should take it as good news in its own right if somebody else is paying attention to the competitive environment and they’re the first to share.

If they're sharing it in a panicky or flippant way, we want to steer the conversation in a more constructive direction. But don't dwell on this, and don't beat yourself up if you don’t get there first.

#2: Make no tradeoff between honesty and confidence

Our goal in writing crispy competitive news briefings is to make no tradeoff between honesty and confidence.

If there's tough news about a competitor running up one of their strengths or closing a key weakness, we have to face those facts. We can't gloss over hard truths if we're to get to a shared understanding of our competitive landscape.

At the same time, it can't be dark clouds and thunderstorms every time the organization hears from competitive intel.

Part of our job is to conclude our analysis with a confident point of view about how we're going to navigate our way through this. Maybe this news validates some things that we were already doing; maybe it exposes new opportunities for us.

I'm not saying that you should be positive for the sake of being positive. I'm saying our job is to face up to hard facts and end up in a place where we feel confident that we've got the right strategy and programs to compete and win.

#3: Be careful about making judgments based on your own product experience

In today’s world of product-led growth, people are quick to try competitor products themselves and make judgments about them, but you need to tread carefully here.

My rationale isn’t what you might think. I don’t advise against this only because it’s unethical (although the recent $2 billion – with a B! – in damages that Appian won from Pegasystems over some unethical CI might serve as an important lesson in being careful with our competitive research tactics). I have a different reason for this, entirely.

If I'm going to use a competitor's product and make judgments about it, I need to be extremely careful. This is because I'm not the target customer, nor am I an ordinary user.

Because I'm somebody that thinks about this product category all day, I could pick up on trivial things, that might represent hours saved for a new user of this product category. Conversely, things that seem novel to me might be irrelevant, overkill, and hard to understand for a user that's coming to this category or product for the first time.

The operating principle (which if you follow me or you've taken my course you've probably heard a lot about) is ‘customer-obsessed, competitor-aware’. Part of being customer-obsessed is not rushing to make judgments without putting the customer's experience and perspective at the very center.

It's okay if you want to investigate competitor products to round out your understanding. However, make sure you take a step back, listen to how customers are responding, and maybe look at how the competitor’s community is responding - especially for new products. Put more weight on those signals than on your own experience of toying around with a product that isn’t designed for you.

You might be thinking, “Well, I'm a product marketer, and we sell a product to marketers!” or “I'm a researcher, and we sell products to researchers!” I still don't buy it. You're someone who thinks about that product category all day long. That's the key issue, so just be careful.

Tune in to the second episode of Meet the Masters: The Product Marketing Podcast, where Alex McDonnell speaks with host Charley Gale about how to communicate findings to your team to get a proactive response, the ethics and legalities of CI, Alex's biggest CI success, and more.

Breaking news! Your action plan

Imagine you're using a competitive intel tracking platform, and it catches some big competitor news.

We're gonna take a tour through the steps you can take in less than a business day to create that real crispy competitive news briefing that’s going to help everybody keep their cool and make sense of this competitive news in a constructive way.

Step one: Acknowledge the news

First, acknowledge the news on your competitive intel channel with a message like, “Hey, we're working on a full briefing, but here's what we initially noticed, and here are some of the questions we have. If you have any thoughts on this, please comment below.” Keep it all out in the open.

Step two: Do some digging

Then, we can do a little digging. If we can pick up customer signals in reaction to the launch, we're going to want to put more emphasis on those than any judgments that we might make as the competitor. As I said, our judgments are going to be biased.

Look at social media. Maybe there are posts in the competitor’s go-to community. Look out for new help articles too and any questions on those. Customers might be asking about the limitations of the new product, and you can work those into your briefing. Any customer signal we can pick up in the early moments after launch is precious.

Step three: Write your first draft

Next, we've got to do some synthesis and distill all the information we're collecting into a first draft. Really do think of it as a first draft – it's going to be messy, incomplete, and not quite right.

These are the guiding questions that I keep in mind when I'm writing the draft for a competitive news briefing:

What might this mean for customers? Is there a new functionality or a simplified functionality? If it's an add-on product, is it going to complicate the way that customers deal with our competitor? There are all kinds of things that a new product launch or acquisition might mean for customers.
What might this mean for our positioning and messaging? Does this sound similar or different from what we're saying? If so, we can tweak our competitive messaging pretty quickly, although we may need to do some training and enablement to make it stick.
What might this mean for our roadmap and strategy? This takes a longer-term view. We need to think about whether this is going to impact the product investments and bets we're making.
What does this tell us about our competitor’s strategy? If you have a competitive intel tracking tool, go back into the archives, look at past briefings, and think about the overall strategy of that competitor. Does this recent move represent a change of direction?

The answers to these questions are going to help you add some much-needed context to your briefing and avoid the dreaded “link and stink.”