Enrollment management, meet competitive intelligence

For some, the mere mention of competitive intelligence (CI) conjures up a Hollywood image of trench coats, shadows and spying. Others see it simply as a fancy name for gathering and processing information. The result is a confusing and loaded phrase that many are reluctant to use. One elite New England university, for example, offers a multipart lecture on CI, but the professor dares not call it that, so the lessons are wrapped into a larger course on "international strategic development."

Teachers in the emerging field are fighting an uphill battle to win legitimacy even in business schools. The problem is the curriculum is painfully thin and composed mainly of war stories. Fears of academic turf wars compounded by general disagreement about what competitive intelligence really means have stymied development of CI courses of study.

EMBRACING CI

But if CI is struggling to get in the front door of academia, it seems to be having little trouble walking in through the back.

Indeed, while the deans and faculty hesitate, college administrators and marketers are increasingly embracing the elemental concepts of CI. They realize that in a world of savvy students and parents, price sensitivity and third-party rankings, they have to keep closer track of what other institutions are doing in order to remain successful themselves.

A consultant to a top East Coast CI firm reports that a New England business school wants to build "competitive portfolios" on other business schools in the region. The portfolio would include analyses of their counterparts' academic offerings as well as marketing strategies and tactics used to attract students. "They're taking the normally accepted tenets of running a business and applying them to school, which is still not a widely accepted notion in academia," the consultant reports.

More institutions are beginning to think like Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, which last year used a grant to hire a director of strategic analysis. The position is formalizing data collection and analysis on such issues as "student achievement, alumni involvement, quality of service delivery, faculty and staff development, and the institution's competitive position in the higher education marketplace."

Today's enrollment management firms and pollsters of prospective donors say that as competition intensifies for students and funding, more of their work touches upon competitive assessment.

To be sure, words like marketing or branding remain anathema to many in higher education. But they are showing up more in the headlines of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Some college administrators "are beginning to recognize that these are useful concepts, that they are in a competitive situation and there's no reason not to use proven tools to accomplish their goals," says Carol Hillman of Hillman & Kersey Strategic Communications, a Boston firm that helps colleges and universities develop marketing and communications plans.

CI, meanwhile, is thriving in the corporate world. Consider the example of the big drug company that became worried over reports from its sales force that a strong competitor might soon introduce a me-too, over-the-counter analgesic product. The company hired a competitive intelligence firm to assess whether it truly faced a formidable new challenge and a potentially huge loss in market share.

The firm assessed information from public sources and, in some instances, from obscure, private contacts. It talked to raw materials suppliers and manufacturers of pill-making machines. And it studied training regimes at the competitor company. Surprisingly, many of the leads came from querying the client's own purchasing department.

The conclusion was that the competitor could not possibly roll out the new analgesic as quickly as the sales force feared. The drug company then was able to cancel a counter-offensive, promotional campaign that would have depleted its war chest and left it in a weakened position for the real battle ahead.

The stock of competitive intelligence began to rise in the late 1980s when leading American companies, for a long time the 800-pound gorillas in their industries, began to face competitive pressures from new technologies and foreign challengers. Around the same time, many of these foreign competitors set up shop in the United States. Because of cultural differences-- especially in Japan and France-foreign firms were willing to do more intensive CI than their American counterparts.

Since its founding in 1986, the Washington D.C.-based Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals has seen its membership grow to nearly 7,000. But it admits that one of its main jobs remains raising the profession above corporate "spy vs. spy" stereotypes. Economic espionage, as SCIP sees it, represents a failure of competitive intelligence, which utilizes "open sources" and ethical inquiry.

FROM INFORMAL TO FORMAL

Given the interaction of "peer groups" among various institutions and the availability of statistics from third parties such as the College Board, colleges are usually aware of what other schools are doing in enrollment management, if not development and other administrative areas. So, in a sense, they already gather information about their business environment. It's only recently, however, that they have begun doing so in the formal, purposeful way that many corporations do.

James Forest, director of strategic analysis at Franklin Pierce College, looks for information pertaining to pre-defined strategic goals that can also be used to help measure outcomes. The goals cover enrollment, academics, technology and student culture. The enrollment goal, for example, is to make Franklin Pierce the first choice of an ever-larger percentage of the freshman class.

No one knows what the academic equivalent of "foreign competition" will be. It may be distance learning, which uses a business model that is very different from traditional higher education. Distance-learning operations like the University of Phoenix enlist the best professors from all over the country and eliminate "underenrolled" courses faster than a Broadway producer dropping the curtain on a bad play. Forest continually asks how "virtual" institutions like the Western Governors University will affect his school, which has six commuter locations for adult learners in addition to a small residential campus.

Competitive intelligence may not have much of a curriculum, but many of its war stories are arresting in their intuitive insight. One CI pioneer used to retreat to his bathtub with an armful of trade magazines and business journals. During one soak, he read a number of stories about the then-novel trend of women entering the workforce. A day or two later he sent his clients a memo predicting the rise of the fast-food industry and the decline of the Singer Sewing Machine Co.

Jerry P. Miller, a professor at Simmons College in Boston and member of SCIP, notes that for higher education, CI is ultimately a game of "brand image," which is determined by the comparative quality of faculty, students and curriculum. "If any one of those fail," he says, "you lose the image."

Since colleges compete for the best students and the best faculty, it makes sense for them to know how their competitors are going about their jobs. Consultants report that more and more colleges are looking to the corporate sector for approaches and processes.

Corporations have learned that they need to understand what happens outside their own buildings. Focusing on internal operations is no longer enough. The external environment can be defined not only in terms of competitors, but also government, customers, suppliers and the overall economic landscape. These players are often valuable sources of information, along with journals, conferences and other information that is accessible to the public. But the real intelligence lies in human contacts-talking to people inside the industry.

Finding and analyzing primary information depends on librarians skilled in navigating databases, research managers who understand their enterprise and analysts willing to ask hard questions. "A lot of people are ignorant of the law and need education as to the limits on how far they can push, but within those limits there is actually quite a bit of latitude," says one industry expert.

Colleges are likely to find themselves echoing the concerns of marketing research managers in business. Says one Hartford insurance executive: "We need to know how our competitors are communicating their sales story to our prospective customers so we can best leverage our strengths against what we perceive their weaknesses to be."

While competitive intelligence techniques cannot predict definitively what the world will look like in the future, they can help managers to assemble reasonable assessments of what it might look like. Competitive intelligence works when it provides early warning of significant change. "The biggest thing we hear from CEOs is, 'I don't want to be surprised. That's what keeps me up at night,"' reports one CI practitioner. As higher education becomes more competitive, it's not hard to imagine similarly sleepless college presidents.

David N. Giguere is founder and managing director of Boston Research Communications in Belmont, Mass., a research and analysis organization. He was editor of CONNECTION from 1981 to 1983.

Copyright New England Board of Higher Education Summer 1999
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