Question: What approaches a business firm could use to gather information about competion and evaluate them? 

Answer: Obviously the web is a great place to start, look through their website, and do a search on the company to see if there are any articles or press on them. A very common, but sneaky way is to have a friend or associate pretend to be a potential customer and have them ask all of the questions you want to learn. Be careful with this method, do not ask any questions that are outside of the standard questions that your customers ask you.
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