A Rounded Picture: Using Media Framing as a Tool for Competitive Intelligence and Business Research

Many of the organizations who commission news monitoring agencies for press cutting deliveries do very little with the articles they collect other than occasionally circulating individual items of interest and the judgements which managers make about their competitors tend to be made on the basis of one or two recent articles. Framing methodologies offer opportunities for analyzing data sourced from news and trade media in order to provide rounded pictures of organizational cultures, strategies and management styles. Framing offers distinct advantages to competitive intelligence professionals, business researchers, librarians, academics and students. Focuses primarily on media framing as a tool for competitive intelligence (CI) and competitor analysis, stressing the benefits of media framing in terms of the ease of application and relative cheapness in terms of data resources. Media framing can take the large amount of disparate information generated by the print media and organize it in such a way as to create distinct and unique intelligence about competitors. Since all the information used by media framing is obtained from public domain sources, it is exempt from the legal and ethical issues which often confront CI and business research professionals. The overall nature of media framing is described with step-by-step guidance in its application to real situations. Typical of the sets of constructs which news items on competitors should be analyzed include: possible substitute services; possible substitute products; potential entrants to client market; competitor’s relationship with suppliers; competitor’s relationship with buyers; competitor’s pricing strategy; competitor’s market focus; competitor’s talent pool; competitor’s organizational culture and management style; and change in competitor’s organization.