Case Study One.

With adverse movements in the $AUD exchange rate, a company in the mining and earth moving equipment market was struggling with the pricing strategies of their major competitors.

What would happen if they increased prices to maintain the eroding margins brought about by the increased cost of imported supplies? Would key competitors move to match this? Or have they the capacity and appetite to absorb supply costs and operate on slimmer margins? The multi-million dollar profit implications of decisions of this sort prompted the company to establish an internal CI unit charged with generating the key intelligence needed to support these decisions.

MindShifts worked with the organisation's CI champion over a period of two years to complete a sequence of reports, each of which focused on the key competitor in each of the major contestable market segments. The sequencing of the studies was determined by the evolving impacts of the turbulence in the global industrial equipment market.

The intelligence products, as well as enabling the client to know its competitors and their intentions in some detail, shaped market, support and distribution strategies across key industries and markets. 

Case Study Two.

A client in printing and fulfilment had been watching the growth of a competitor for several years, it had been losing some of the best technical people to the competitor and recently a significant contract had gone their way against expectations.

The prevailing client view was that their competitor was a bunch of "opportunistic cowboys" who sailed very close to the wind and had been lucky to date.

The competitor profile assembled by MindShifts showed a very successful and stable senior management team who had grown the company through well judged and timed strategic acquisitions, designed either to enter new geographical markets or access needed production capability and technology. The profile was able to track the clear strategic trajectory of the competitor and to predict where and why they would make their next acquisition. We were also able to speculate on who this acquisition might be. Armed with this intelligence, the client was able to modify its marketing and operations strategy to meet this now national competitive threat and to acquire the technology needed to match the competitor. 

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