As it was exposed in something close to realtime, not very.
That’s because both companies know every formula every other player uses, down to the magic passes over the extraction beaker.
I think there might be a little of this, but not much. Companies don’t lead by watching over their shoulders. I bet very few companies consider such stuff a main strategy.
Call me a foolish romantic…
Besides, why would Pepsi want the Coke formula, anyway? They want Pepsi to taste different, ‘the taste of a new generation’ (to quote one of their ad slogans). There are lots of local, low-price colas that taste pretty nearly identical to Coke – none of them threaten Coke’s sales (or profits),
Alrighty then.
I work for a large bank. I wouldn’t know everything that is done (especially if it were of dubious legality that someone was trying to hide). But I have been assigned various competitive analysis tasks over the years where I’ve used what I can publicly learn about other companies (this is why I have accounts at many of the large U.S. banks so that I can get into their online banking sites) and we subscribe to lots of third-party reporting sites that’ll tell us what other companies will do.
But one time we were looking to improve one of our online banking products and an exec wondered how another major bank has done the system architecture. The next day a relatively recent hire walked in and dropped the internal Tech Spec document for that product and said “my wife works there and she got that for me.”
We all practically went through the walls getting out of that room. So far as I know, nobody ever read it, and I do knew he got chewed out pretty good. Don’t have a clue how consistent that reaction would be across the firm. But they certainly make us spend enough time on mandatory online classes every year to at least pretend that it should be the response.
I work for a large defense contractor that is often accused by the competition of having such industrial spies, to which I laugh because of the inefficiencies I see everywhere. I have worked in a market research capacity where I would technically be one of those ‘spies’ if such a thing existed, and I can tell you all the data I have ever collected is based on simple research anyone could do on the Web.
We do not have any secret information. About the most derivative intelligence we gather is what a typical labor category a competitor bids might be. In other words, for a 50 person job with 10 different labor categories, I can’t conclude anything. But on a past task I lost where a competitor bid three mid level systems engineers for $300,000 (which the Government publishes as part of their debrief to you on why you lost), it doesn’t take a genius to figure out “well I guess this competitor has a fully burdened labor rate with profit of $100,000 for a mid level systems engineer”, which now allows you to figure out what their price might be in future bids involving X number of mid level systems engineers in the future.
Often a customer will approach us and tell us we should bid on something, but that has just as much likelihood as being the customer telling us “I hate the people providing this service to me today, and I want you” as it is to be “hey, I’ll get in trouble if I only get one bid on this task so I want to falsely make you believe you have a chance at it even though I will give it back to your competitor100 times out of 100”. If I see the customer ripping the competition a new asshole in public several times, then I’m more inclined to believe it is the first case, but I hardly think that’s “intelligence” rather than “common sense”.