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This study examines how firms’ use of competitor-focused accounting information, specifically competitor monitoring information, impacts their pricing, demand, and overall revenue performance. The monitoring activities examined are the scope of monitoring, monitoring above and below one’s own hotel class (i.e., market segment), and the extent of reciprocity of monitoring. Competitor analysis is a central element in strategic management accounting (SMA), yet little empirical research has been done since companies do not disclose competitor monitoring activities. Proving the value of competitive monitoring provides strong support for SMA. Archival, proprietary monitoring information regarding pricing, demand, and revenue were obtained from one of the largest hotel markets in the United States. Using regression, we modeled the relationships between performance measures (pricing, demand, and revenue) and monitoring behaviors, while controlling for quality (hotel characteristics and management skill), competitive intensity, hotel class, geographic location, and ownership type. Our results indicate that two aspects of competitor monitoring impact hotel pricing that, in turn, impacts hotel demand and revenue performance. Specifically, a hotel monitoring more competitors (what we refer to as Scope) achieves higher prices with unchanged demand, resulting in higher revenue performance. Most hotels monitor within their class. However, deviating from one’s class has profound outcomes: looking at lower (higher) quality hotels results in a hotel setting lower (higher) prices, resulting in higher (unchanged) demand and lower (higher) revenue performance. Surprisingly, we did not find support for the reciprocity of monitoring. That is, whether the competitors monitored by a hotel, in turn follow the target, has no impact on hotel revenue performance outcomes. While the SMA literature notes the importance of competitor monitoring, this study fills a gap in an important, under-researched area by documenting the link between competitor monitoring behaviors and organizational revenue performance. This may help promote greater diffusion of SMA practices.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how issue management and media monitoring is exercised in the digital age to anticipate crises. More specifically, it was investigated how these practices differ across communication professionals, organizations, and sectors in the Netherlands. Organizations are nowadays confronted with a fast-changing environment. Anticipating dicey issues, being in control of the flow of messages, and managing various stakeholders on diverse channels becomes a primary concern for organizations these days.

The study relies on qualitative interviews with 17 communication professionals working in various industrial sectors in the Netherlands. Professionals were recruited from distinct organizations and from diverse sectors, including media, public affairs, technology, consultancy, municipality, lottery, oil/gas, cultural, insurance, and the financial industry. The interview data were analyzed by means of an inductive analysis and in-depth reading.

Practitioners seem to acknowledge the importance of issue monitoring. However, professionals differ with regard to their expertise in online media monitoring, depending on the sector they work for. Stakeholder mapping and the monitoring of competitors has been found to be crucial for issue management, but also to vary among large and small organizations. Eventually, monitoring in times of crises was seen indispensable. It also has the potential to empower practitioners within their organizations.

New technologies, external services, and automized monitoring processes have facilitated issue monitoring for professionals to a great extent, making it possible to analyze great amounts of data efficiently in short time and with fewer resources. Furthermore, the focus of media monitoring is increasingly moving toward the online sphere, including the active engagement of stakeholders. Eventually, the empowerment of practitioners through online monitoring practices in times of crises can be considered as a further step toward the positioning of communication professionals within the dominant coalition.

This study discusses the problems of organising competitive intelligence activities in a corporate organisation. Traditionally in many large corporations the collection, interpretation and analysis of competitive information has been assigned to a specialised intelligence or competitor analysis unit in order to exploit the synergy created by centralisation. This organising mechanism has, however, serious shortcomings that are considered in this study. It is debated that this centralised and systematic approach to managing and exploiting competitive information ignores the actual ways that managers and other knowledge workers utilise information resources in their work processes. An empirical study was made in a multinationally operating Finnish forest industry company in order to examine, what kind of competitive information managers and other knowledge workers need in their work processes, what were the most valuable information sources and how this information was actually utilised and communicated inside the corporation. The results of this empirical study are discussed. Some guidelines are provided to improve the process of coordinating and combining both systematically and unsystematically collected competitive information into a coherent organisational mechanism.

The textbooks are full of explanations of why businesses must understand their competitive arena. There are numerous conceptual frameworks and checklists to assist in this endeavour. Perhaps not too surprisingly, many businesses exhibit only a superficial knowledge of their competitors’ strategies and actions, taking little account of their rivals when formulating their own marketing plans. The electronics industry, already the fourth most important industrial sector in the world, is tipped to become the principal growth sector in the next century. A recent survey reveals that in this important industry, companies’ attempts to understand their competitors do not always live up to the models of Michael Porter or Philip Kotler.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a management tool to maximise the effective time-to-market of a portfolio given the competitive monitoring activities.

From the constant monitoring of competition and market needs, it is proposed to define a time-to-need, time when the market may consume the product under development and competitor will not provide a solution before. This time-to-need is proposed to be defined by an expert committee in a periodical meeting of the portfolio. Once it is identified the time-to-need and the time-to-market (project management), it is possible to manage resources in order to maximise the portfolio outputs.

The application of the mentioned approach in an automotive industry showed improvements on number of launched new products per year (double) and on number of patented product launched (four times more).

This approach applies on projects of medium to long term (more than two years) because the resource management can consume set up time. The presented results in this work were based in a single case, which can limit the expected results of the application of this methodology.

This approach enables a constant alignment among experts and a better deployment of resources.

This work provides a practical tool to promote better resource allocation in a portfolio. It can also be an enabler of innovation projects once it finds resources potential to fund the more front end work.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper performs a sentiment analysis on the tweets of three food delivery app companies operating in India – UberEats, Zomato, and Swiggy. Most of the incoming tweets from customers concerned ordering and the delivery tracking experience, as well as the quality of the food. The public nature of Twitter means data about competitors can be analyzed to carve out a competitive advantage. Leaders and managers are therefore advised to create a strategy for social media-based competitor monitoring and competitor analysis, and to boost the opportunities for customers to experience positive emotions when interacting with the company on Twitter.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

There is a danger of allowing competitive analysis to receive less than adequate attention in the marketing‐planning process as it is subordinated to a customer‐driven focus. Clearly important though customers are, they should not dominate marketing strategy and planning to the exclusion of other influential groups, one of these being competitors. With this in mind, a pilot research project was undertaken to gain a better understanding of how UK companies conduct competitive intelligence. From this pilot, a tentative typology of companies was developed to reflect four attributes of competitive intelligence activity: attitude, gathering, use, and location. Further research was subsequently undertaken to corroborate the findings of the pilot study, test the appropriateness of the typology and further develop the classification definitions. The research has resulted in a typology that illustrates a continuum of behaviour on the four strands of investigation. From this, an understanding of CI best practice can be deduced.

Drawing from resource-based theory, the authors aim to study how and under what conditions small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) capitalise on their proactive entrepreneurial behaviour (PEB) to achieve new product development (NPD) performance.

The authors’ data were drawn from a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of 401 UK-based SMEs in the manufacturing sector.

The authors identify an upward curvilinear relationship between PEB and NPD performance. Taking a step further, the authors propose and confirm that this curvilinear association arises from, in part, SMEs’ innovation capability, which in turn translates into NPD performance. The authors also find that this upward curvilinear relationship between PEB and innovation capability flips to a downward curvilinear relationship when firms pursue a customer and competitor orientation.

This paper looks beyond the linear relationship that exists among entrepreneurial behaviour, market orientation and innovation outcomes.

Social comparison literature has long established that drawing comparisons facilitates competitive motivation. Yet, the literature has neglected how the actor may simultaneously become the target of comparison, which can likewise increase competitive motivation. Therefore, competitive motivation increases not only because coacting competitors draw social comparisons but also because they are simultaneously the target of other's social comparison. In this chapter, we build a dual process framework to explain how comparing and being compared each facilitate competitive motivation. We also posit that these processes – comparing and being compared, respectively – are bidirectional and reciprocal, as each process can incite the other. Finally, we discuss the circumstances under which comparing and being compared combine additively versus interactively to drive competitive motivation. Our theoretical framework brings together the disparate literatures on social comparison and evaluation apprehension under one unified theory of competitive motivation, and proposes new directions for competition research.

The effective management of banking products becomes more critical as the external environment becomes more competitive. In the corporate sector this is particularly true and a structured, methodical, yet flexible, approach is required. The structure of the product management process is outlined. The key elements are dealt with and the interrelationships with other organisational functions are illustrated, together with the factors that complicate management in the international arena.