I tried to read a couple of articles in the newspapers from a marketing point of view and was actually surprised on how many concepts from the class was I able to recognize. I am going to quickly analyze this article from “The Globe And Mail” which talks about the competitive environment of wireless service providers.
The article fist talks about how the Olympic games created new opportunities for these wireless companies by expanding demand for mobile TV. Multiple major wireless service providers in Canada such as Rogers, Telus, and now Bell started to implement strategies on how to take advantage of this opportunity. All of them tried to get exclusive deals with different kinds of sport leagues (NHL, NFL, CFL) to gain access to the video of the games which they can then stream to the customers. I think that the concept of the competitive intelligence applies here because all the companies had to be monitoring each others activity in order to quickly respond to the actions taken by the competition. Eventually all three companies were able to get at least some kind of sports league to sign a contract with them.
I have also noticed an interesting paradox regarding the ability of these companies to stay in a long-term advantage. On one hand all the companies were very quick to get a hold of a contract with some kind of a sports league. These leagues are however not the same and each targets slightly different kind of customer. All the targeted customers are people who enjoy watching sports, however, among these are people who like some sports less and some more. For example some people like hockey but do not like football. Therefore if one of these leagues was more popular than the others, the company which has a contract with this particular one would be in a long-term advantage over the other companies.