Business Journals & Trade Magazines as Intelligence Resources

 

Business journals and trade magazines are excellent intelligence sources for both market intelligence as well as competitive intelligence. Most importantly here, the intelligence consuming organization needs to make sense of it all.

Condensing and bringing relevant intelligence into context of immediate business needs and long term market strategies are crucial elements of intelligence preparation.

Trade journals of all industries and markets provide a competitive environment similar to trade shows where many competing business and organizations try to attract customer attention by visualization and demonstration of their offering.

Although of public nature, trade journals provide a lot of intelligence that is otherwise only available from direct resources of the competing companies and organizations. When instructing customers with technical articles or promoting features and services through editorials, competing companies oftentimes give away in-depth information into their technical capabilities, organizational setup and many other ankles of their operations and competitive abilities.

Scouring and evaluating this information and transforming it into usable intelligence for the own company can be viable. On the other hand this could demonstrate how to execute some level of caution towards the own information not be compromising in a competitive sense. Counter intelligence is another important market intelligence discipline that must not be underestimated.

Along with intelligence analysts who evaluate trade journal content for intelligence use, counter intelligence measures should be conducted by internal staff. Simple publishing approval processes could incorporate such a double check stage so the organization can assure not to provide any intelligence to competing companies via business trade journals and consumer magazines.