How the Academy’s program can improve your marketing savvy

Marketers need intelligence on new product developments, competitive benchmarking, tactical competitor moves and marketing campaigns. Marketers need strategic intelligence, as well, including: long-term change drivers affecting customers and competitors and who may be shifting their companies’ market positioning. Marketers need superior intelligence sources and even more so insightful strategic insights if they are to beat the competition.

The Academy is the only professional institution that combines the intelligence expertise with the strategic teaching required for a real world intelligence-based marketing strategy. Marketing managers graduating from our workshops claim they immediately put our tools to use.

Among the nine courses, several are especially relevant to marketing managers and market planners. We suggest you attend Intelligence Sources & Collection Techniques to learn how to collect primary intelligence at trade shows and conferences as well as how to access a wealth of secondary intelligence which will give you an advantage over your less sophisticated peers and competitors. Analysis & Competitive Benchmarking will teach you how to compare your marketing efforts to your rivals. Competitive Blindspots will teach you how to analyze your markets or new markets you are looking to enter to determine pressure points and longer term changes that you must take into account. The workshop will also allow you to diagnose holes in your current marketing strategy. War Gaming, one of the most popular tools in marketing today, will allow you to proactively plan your market penetration, or defend your current market leadership against both industry evolution and competitors’ future moves. The War Game course is only taught at the academy and it is based on accumulated decade long experience of running such games for Fortune 100 companies.

Cross-Competitor Analysis teaches you how to assess multiple competitors and your marketing strategy against them. It teaches you which competitor is your worst, and it is not always an easy or intuitive determination. Scenario construction is another popular tool which can be used by marketers to peek into the future and prepare the company for various threats as well as making decisions as to which market opportunities are worth pursuing.

Two new courses are especially relevant to marketing directors. One, The role of CI in Strategy discusses the essence of superior strategy and what intelligence is essential to keep it superior. The other, Industry’s Profit Pool Map allows marketers to identify new profit opportunities in their industry’s value chain.

If you have any questions, contact our Registrar, Lynne Smith at lsmith@academyci.com, or call (US) 888-732-6812 or (International) +1 630-983-5530.