Applying Creative Research Methods to
Gather Critical Competitor Intelligence
Company and Role
With 2,000+ institutional clients across airliners, restaurants, and hotels, Big Scoop Ice Cream is one of the largest institutional suppliers of food and dairy products in the Philippines. As a Management Consultant, I reported directly to the leadership team to deliver strategic insights that supported decision-making — and made recommendations that strengthened competitive positioning.
The Situation
Aice Brands is a well-known ice-cream brand in Indonesia — and subsidiary of Mengniu Dairy, a manufacturer and distributor of dairy products in China. In 2018, Aice Brands entered the Filipino market. The size of the incumbent introduced strategic concerns from management about whether competitive positioning and market share was threatened. I was tasked with filling gaps in knowledge within the leadership team through a comprehensive competitor analysis project. My objective was to:
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Deeply understand Aice’s current business context in the Philippines, which included understanding its market entry strategy
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Deeply understand Aice’s business in Indonesia, including organizational structure, team composition, team operations, business model, and competitive advantages
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Deeply understand the environmental context in which Aice operated in within Indonesia
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Leverage this deep understanding of the incumbent to forecast strategic moves in the Philippines — and make actionable recommendations to leadership
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Formalize my findings through a report
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The Challenge
Information accuracy was paramount, given the insights would directly impact business operations and resource allocation decisions. The challenge became where to find recent, reliable, and impactful intelligence.
The Opportunity
My initial sources of information were typical for a competitor analysis study — company websites, social media accounts, and third party market research reports. But experienced with utilizing LinkedIn to conduct labor market research, I noticed an opportunity to leverage LinkedIn to gather competitor intelligence that was reliable, insightful, and impactful.
The Creative Solution
I gathered data from Aice’s 1000+ LinkedIn profiles in Indonesia to understand Aice’s organizational structure, and team compositions and functions. With an understanding of internal operations, I could develop accurate conclusions on competitive advantages and business model characteristics in Indonesia — valuable data points for informing recommendations and predictions in the Philippines.
The Impact
This creative, LinkedIn focused research method revealed critical insights paramount for business survival. Management’s prior understanding of the incumbent was that they did not target B2B institutional clients, Big Scoop’s core market. LinkedIn research suggested the opposite — that Business Development Teams in Indonesia were specifically responsible for growing demand and increasing sales in the B2B market, which was a critical piece of intelligence that motivated management to adapt their client relationship strategy, and focus on strengthening their competitive moat around quality and price.
This creative, LinkedIn focused research method also provided intelligence that informed highly reasonable predictions. With a new state of the art production facility nearing completion in the Philippines, the incumbent would be capable of generating production surpluses that thus, created a natural business need for a larger sales team to grow demand and increase sales. The question then became — which market and customer segment would they target? With a strong understanding of Aice’s business operations in Indonesia, which targeted the B2B market, I predicted that expansion into Big Scoop’s core market was imminent within the next 1-3 years, yielding strong recommendations to monitor job postings for indications that their business development team was expanding — and thus, seeking to grow their presence in the B2B market, Big Scoop’s core market.