CI Practitioners Moving Beyond Five Forces...

Most of us have used Porter's Five Forces model when analyzing their industry. But how many of us apply the rigor of Porter’s other analytical technique, the Four Corners model to scrutinize specific competitors?

Here’s our take: while less widely used, Porter's Four Corners is an extremely valuable tool that integrates an understanding of a competitor’s drivers, strategies, capabilities and assumptions to determine what players are likely to do and recognize the "why" behind their actions. It is an essential tool for CI practitioners to master.

The Four Corners model, developed by Michel Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, is a model used to look at the behavior of an individual organization to predict competitor behavior. The model can also very useful in uncovering blind spots, assumptions that were valid at one time but no longer hold to be to true.

Examining all four "corners" of competitor activity enables a competitive intelligence professional to better understand what drives a firm to behave in a certain fashion and anticipate future actions. This insight then equips one to conduct the last step of Four Corners analysis, answering the Competitor Response Profile questions in the center of the four corners. The key questions include:

Is the competitor satisfied with its current position?
What likely moves or strategy shifts will the competitor make?
Where is the competitor vulnerable?
What will provoke the greatest retaliation by the competitor?