Challenge
Every company, big or small, wants to know what their competitors are doing. Who are they partnering with? Who are their target audiences? What are their strategies into new markets?
Millions of dollars and countless hours of time are allocated towards generating competitive intelligence and answering the known unknown questions and discovering the unknown unknowns. Analysts and strategists use a plethora of tools to visualize and track activity with competitors, only to harp in on outdated insights.
Fortunately, the hair-pulling frustrations of investments into competitive intelligence can be simplified and done in a fraction of the time using Centrly. In order to observe this, we observed the growing market of early and late-stage carbon capture competitors expanding to multiple verticals. Within one hour, they were able to generate actionable insights from a list of 6,500 growing competitors, a treasure that would have taken weeks to exhume from a list of that size.
Approach
The approach to a complex field of research proves simple using Centrly. We were able to generate a list of known competitors and unknown competitors by constructing their list using descriptors that match their market, such as "carbon capture", "ccus", and "CO2 capture".
Once 100 relevant competitors had been populated, topic trackers were set to match the known markets competitors engaged in. Using Cory AI and keyword matching, co-mentions, news mentions and investments /acquisitions dating back 2 years were generated for the list companies in one hour.
The Insights
From the signals, insights into potential customers and rising unknown competitors could be seen. Let's take a look at some of the signals the business development team reviewed to get insights for their business strategies
1: (Known Unknowns) Potential Customer Insights (Finance Topic)
Co-mentions for competitors Carbon Engineering and CarbonCure Technologies revealed The Bank of Montreal has been purchasing carbon capture credits over the past 2 years. From this, the business development team can look towards The Bank of Montreal as a potential customer.
2: (Known Unknowns) Potential Customer Insights (E-Commerce Topic)
Co-mentions for competitors Carbon Engineering and CarbonBuilt exhumed the potential customer Shopify for the business development team. Shopify has previously set goals for reducing their carbon emissions and have recently been active in reaching those goals per the signals generated.
3: (Known Unknowns) Identifying Unidentified Competitors
Identifying unknown competitors is hard to do, however, using signals quickly shows which companies are working with who. In this case, HIF Global doesn't classify themselves as a carbon capture company, and thus looking through a list of >6,500 competitors will make it difficult to view which competitors are actually gaining traction.
4: (Unknown Unknowns) Surfacing Emerging Competitors
Competitors can surface as strategies begin to change. In this case, Aemetis historically is a biofuels company that recently invested in a carbon capture division that has gained traction, as seen through signals and not through database searching.
4: (Unknown Unknowns) Unknown Parallel Markets
Signals allowed the business development team to quickly know which markets had potential based on competitor activity. Here, LanzaTech had many co-mentions with cosmetics and fragrance companies, an unknown market to expand to for the carbon capture user.