Octopus Competitive Intelligence

Outthink Later: Why Good Competitive Intelligence Ignores Better Judgment: Weekly Winning Strategies Ask People to Work Against Their Better Judgment That’s the play. That’s how winners think in markets they weren’t invited into. Forget playing it safe. Safe is where your competitors want you. They want you to be cautious. They want you to calculate risk like it’s your religion. And they want you stuck in spreadsheets while they move fast with instinct. Better judgment is usually fear with a marketing budget. In competitive intelligence, “better judgment” often appears wrapped in polite analysis. You’ll hear stuff like: “The timing’s not right.” “Let’s wait for more data.” “The incumbents have too much market share.” “They raised $20M, we can’t touch that.” All of that sounds smart. Feels responsible. It’s also how you get left behind. Markets don’t reward the rational. They reward the relentless. You don’t need to out-think the competition. You need to out-decide them. Let’s look at w...

Competitive Intelligence keep it simple to start: Weekly Winning Strategies Avoiding what’s easy can be a cop-out. You’ll hear people say, “Take the hard path. That’s where growth happens.” Fine. Lift weights, climb a mountain, or meditate silently for 30 days. But when it comes to understanding a market, building a business, or tracking your competitors? Ignore the obvious stuff, and you miss the gold right before you. They prefer to employ data analysts to analyse the granular data deeply. Competitive intelligence does not need to be complicated. Keep it simple. At least to start with. Let’s talk about competitor analysis Everyone wants some secret tactic. Some edge. A process that sounds fancy enough to feel like a strategy. They want to skip over the “easy” stuff like: Reading your competitor’s reviews Subscribing to their newsletters Watching how they price their offers Tracking what tools they’re using Studying what content gets them traction But here’s the twist: this “easy” stu...

If you’re considering using Generative AI (Chatgpt, Gemini, Claud, etc) or monitoring newswires and press releases, that’s fine. However, you do it with the same data as your competitors; same assumptions and where’s your competitive advantage? The only advantage here is if your competitors are not bothering to look. Or you have found a magic prompt from an AI prompt guru that gives you what you need. A few months back, I attended a competitive intelligence conference where a senior competitive intelligence professional working for a defence IT company in London told me he found a great generative AI prompt that he is using. He even gave me the link to it. It was one of those found on a “how to run a business on AI” website. So it was available to all; it was now being trained on the CI professional’s data and was poor at best. But it also gave you the answer you wanted to see straight away. It was the wrong answer, but it was an answer. You’re playing the same game if you’re doing com...

The Right Competitive Intelligence Questions: Weekly Winning Strategies The right competitive intelligence questions and the good questions aren’t just intellectual exercises or quick lists with little thought. “Erm, what’s their turnover? What’s their pricing? And erm what is their strategy?” Especially if you’re a founder, chief revenue officer, strategist, or solopreneur trying to grasp your competitors and their actual and perceived growth. These questions are the tools for cutting through the surface-level noise and revealing the machinery underneath. Ask the right question, and you get access. An edge. A lever. Most teams are still doing reconnaissance from a hilltop, squinting through binoculars. But that’s not your job. You’re not just trying to see further — you’re trying to break in. Crack the fourth wall of your competitor’s strategy. To do that, you don’t need better data. You need better questions. Not Smart. Sharp. Too many teams waste cycles asking “smart-sounding” quest...

Let’s start with football (soccer) because it’s a metaphor that is too good to ignore. All about using data without context. Watching Newcastle vs Crystal Palace in the vain hope that Palace will do Nottingham Forest a favour and beat Newcastle. The commentator told us the xG (expected goals) says Palace should’ve been in with a shout. 2.22 vs 1.48. But the final score? Newcastle 5, Palace 0. And no help to Forest whatsoever. That’s a statistical headbutt to the face of raw data. And yet, people still cling to metrics like they’re gospel. In football. In business and competitive intelligence. Everywhere. Like most business KPIs, here’s what’s real: xG is an isolated signal. It tells you what  might  happen, not what  actually  happened. Or, more importantly,  why  it happened. Let me break this down for you regarding market and  competitive analysis  because this same  delusion by data  is exactly what screws up good companies every sing...