I asked a Client today what she knew about her competitors.

“Not much!” came the answer. “It’s too hard finding information on them…Plus it feels a bit sneaky.”

“Get over it!” was my measured response.

The reality is, how can you possibly position your business in a unique and interesting way, that’s different to what the competition are doing without doing a bit of ‘healthy surveillance’?

To this end, I’ve developed the following tips for gathering information on your competitors:

Get their customers’ perspectives. Request sales brochures and download information from your competitors’ websites. Sign up for newsletters and promotions. Buy products or services for competitive analysis, and chat with employees at retail stores. Attend their public seminars.

Get your customers’ perspectives. Ask how your products or services compare to the competition and how other companies’ marketing efforts differ from your own. Make sure your customer service representatives take note of complaints, compliments and other comments callers make about competitors.

Get their investors’ perspectives. If the company is public, buy some shares so you’ll receive annual reports and other corporate notices. Use a monitoring service (Google Alerts is free) to track print, broadcast and online coverage of your competitors. Join industry associations, and subscribe to trade and government publications that focus on your field.

Gathering competitive information isn’t as hard as it sounds. Much of it is easily available and relatively inexpensive to obtain.

What do you think?