Inferring Competitors’ Intention: Using Content Analysis and Product Concept Trajectory

: Content analysis proves to be very useful in inferring the intention among competing firms. Content analysis is the systematic and replicable examination of symbols of communication. Like individuals, firms render messages outside of themselves. Their daily activities are, so to speak, communications process. Therefore researchers are able to apply content analysis to the exploration of firms’ behavior. This paper will take up, as one of these cases, new products news releases made by inkjet printer makers. Through the analysis, the product concept trajectory is developed. These depicted trajectories show us the intention of competing firms.

strengths. Thus strategic intent is a guideline to competitive innovation: Anyone who wishes to analyze competitors' behavior need to infer their intention. To infer the intentions among competitors, the strategist must establish practical understanding of the dynamic competitive environment.
Encouraged by the discernment of competitors' intention, the company could find its further favorable step.
However, in practice, it is very hard for strategists or researchers to infer competitors' intention. This is why strategic intent-based competitor analysis has never yet become popular.
Nonetheless, once an effective method to infer the intention has been developed, the analysis should be fully accepted. This paper will propose a competitors' intention inferring method, on which content analysis has bright prospects.

Advantage of Content Analysis
Communication process in which people transfer each other's message occupies a central position in human activities. In practice, messages are delivered through a great variety of media (e.g., newspapers, magazines and TV/radio programs as mass communication media; letters, telephones, e-mails and web pages as personal communication media; or movies, music, pictures and novels as artistic expression media, and so on). Content analysis focuses on the content of the media messages.
Defining this formally, quantitative content analysis is the systematic and replicable examination of symbols of communication. The symbols are assigned numeric values according to valid measurement rules, and the analysis of relations involving these values using statistical methods describe the communication, draw inferences about its meaning, or infer from the communication to its context, both of production and consumption (Riffe, Lacy, & Fico, 1998, p. 20).
Content analysis has four main strengths (Riffe, et al., 1998). First, it is an unobtrusive and nonreactive measurement technique. The content with messages is separate and apart from communicators and receivers. Researchers can analyze the message without attracting neither communicators' nor receivers' attention (Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest, 2000). Therefore content analysis has advantage to exclude interviewer effect, which interviewer influences the reaction of interviewee.
Second, because content has a life beyond its production and consumption, longitudinal studies are possible using archived materials that may outlive the communicators, audiences, or the events described in the communication content. Therefore it is able to use content analysis as a complement to investigate historical records.
Third, quantification or measurement of content permits reduction in numbers for large amounts of information or data that would be logistically impossible for close qualitative analysis. Using properly operationalized procedure, such a process of information reduction nonetheless retains meaningful distinction among data. According to valid measurement rules, content analysis data can be handled to compare objectively with each other like analysis of compiling figures from reliable sources (e.g., statistical data, financial data).
Finally, content analysis has virtually no limitation in its applicability to a variety of inquiries important to many disciplines and fields owing to the centrality of communication in human activities.
Obviously, corporate activities are a part of human activities in society. There is no doubt that firms are giving off numerous messages in their communication processes. Most messages are compiling as documents in many firms, which can be suitable for content analysis.
In short, such advantage of content analysis will contribute to the study of corporate business behavior. Especially in case study of business, it is the fundamentals that researchers grasp a fact on that case. To understand the case, researchers usually try to interview with the parties concerned, to investigate historical records, or to analyze compiled figures from reliable sources statistically. The advantage of content analysis complements weak points of such tools (Table 1). Researchers who want to know about the case in depth may be able to make use of content analysis with other studying method to improve its accuracy of grasping facts (Gephart, 1991) and to infer the intention of actors.
Following is an application of content analysis to the study of corporate behavior. The systematic procedure in analysis and the direct use of recorded messages, which are major characteristics of content analysis, enable researchers to infer competitors' intention directly and to compare such intention with each other along a measure crucial to the study.

Inferring Competitors' Intention
In the late 1990s, there was an oligopolistic competition in inkjet printer industry. The big three, namely, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Canon, and EPSON shared the market almost entirely. In such competitive situation, who are the rivals considered is obvious, and each firm is forced to comprehend their own competitive position in the market. To take advantage to rivals, a firm must develop more attractive proposal for customers than rivals.
However, "attractiveness" is erratic. Even in a market segment, there is no one right answer for creating attractiveness. Every firm can feature its products attractively based on the unique interpretation of product concept. In fact, the big three inkjet printer makers have been adopting substantial different product concepts respectively.
Such difference among product concepts partly comes from the difference of strategic intent held by competing firms. Products, that is, inkjet printers themselves, contain the makers' intent. Product concepts sprung from their own intention guide product design and product attribute (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Therefore it is useful for researchers who want to know about the intention among competing firms to analyze their product concepts.
In this paper, we will read the messages from news releases of new products by inkjet printer makers to understand product concepts. A news release is a media delivering information about the firm or the incident to the press. News releases are usually printed documents of few pages, but they are also opened to the public as on web pages these days.
The ultimate purpose of news releases on new product introduction is to convey advantages and attractiveness of the product precisely to reporters.
News release writers evade using hyper exaggerated expression in the text. Hence, messages appeared in news releases stand for straightforward "self image" of the product concept that the firm concerned holds.
Such content analysis of news releases would give fundamental data for inferring intention to researchers.
The inkjet printer as PC peripheral has been changing amorphously the product concept since its invention in the late 1980's. The initial product developed was used as monochrome document printer. While the PC performance enhanced, users came to handle more and more color graphics and color images on PCs. To catch such trend, inkjet printer also shifted its product concept to color printer. In the late 1990's, inkjet printer technology was developed further, which changed the product concept to photo-image printer. This was a result of each maker's product strategy that such fluid characteristics of the product concept were observed in the inkjet printer industry. In the changing process of product concept, each maker seeks competitive advantages over rivals. It is the unique intention of each maker that varies the product concept.
In next section, we examine how different the product concepts of the big three inkjet printer makers are, and infer what intention they have, based on data collected through content analysis.

Utilization of Content Analysis
The data we use in the following analysis is acquired from news releases of new products for Japanese market issued by the big three inkjet printer makers The results show us a unique difference between makers in frequency. Figure 1      Low price intended→ ←Small size intended ／ Full-specification intended→ Canon EPSON HP dots in the lower half signify the more small size-intended attribution. The horizontal axis denotes the frequency of words relative to lower product price setting. Needless to say, the data used in this graph are gathered through content analysis of news releases in the same method as in Figure 1.
In Figure 2, Canon's shift to "small size" at 1999 is remarkable. This can derive the inference that Canon intends to differentiate product concept to small size. In contrast to Canon, EPSON remains in upper side of the graph: It derives the inference that EPSON is not interested in small size product needs. And it seems HP intends to balance full-specification with small size, because its trajectory remains close to the horizontal axis.

Implications
PCT as an application of content analysis method presents us mainly three implications. First, PCT can describe the intended product concept of the time of release. This is because PCT is composed of content analysis data drawn from news release messages analysis. In other words, the maker's confession on their product concept is the data for PCT.  This can be interpreted that Canon does not follow the main trend of the industry and seeks niche strategy.
In this way, researchers can infer the intention of firms. They will get the car's speed and direction.