The Effect of Competitive Intelligence on Marketing Capabilities and Organizational Performance

Abstract

The marketing and strategic management literature is well-documented regarding the drivers of competitive intelligence (CI) and how they are gathered, its organization, and dissemination through the organization. However, the impact of CI upon the development of other organizational capabilities including marketing capabilities and the performance of organizations has been neglected and very scarce through the literature. Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate the impact of CI categories including market intelligence, competitor intelligence and technological intelligence on marketing capabilities (i.e. market-sensing capability and customer-linking capability), as well as the organizational performance. To this end, structured questionnaire was applied and a survey of 225 persons involved in sales and marketing affairs of insurance companies in Iran was administrated. Results showed that CI categories have direct and significant effect on marketing capabilities and the organization’s performance.