Competitive research

Let’s take a fresh look at everyone else who’s playing in your space.

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B market leader, a collaborative not-for-profit, or a startup creating in an emerging category, your brand does not live in a vacuum.

Other brands are actively competing with you, fighting for the attention of your target audiences. At any time, members of those audiences can switch their attention, money, or loyalty to someone else. It’s that simple.

That’s why competition is always on our radar. Developing a brand strategy or action plan without deep knowledge of and respect for the competition is a waste of everyone’s time. We need to know who you’re up against.

Beyond market share and pie charts

You may have already identified a short list of competitors: brands you deem to be most similar to yours; one or two brands seen as benchmarks in your sector; and maybe a few scrappy brands that chase the low end of your market.

Maybe you know what these competitors have to offer and have some idea of how well they’re doing. What else is there to know?

Plenty. Have you been tracking their messaging, looking for shifts over time? Monitoring changes in their communications channels or style? Counting mentions in the media? Taking note of what works for them in social media?

What about the brands that aren’t on your short list? We’ll look at your indirect competitors, those brands with overlapping or adjacent offerings, even if they’re not nearly as good or on target. We’ll also survey the “noise brands”—those that simply distract or misdirect your target audiences, sapping away their attention, and thereby whittling away at your opportunities.

Identifying your asymmetrical advantages

Some people think competition is all about survival of the fittest. That may be what drives natural selection (a very slow process), but none of us have time for that.

We’ll work to speed and skew the selection process in your favor by helping you better understand your evolving competitive landscape as well as your brand’s unique strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats.