A competitor launches a new offer. Your sales team asks for a sharper pitch. Marketing proposes a campaign to explain why your brand is better.
Before approving any of it, leadership needs to know whether the competitor’s offer is actually changing customer decisions.
You may be losing because buyers never considered you. You may be considered and rejected. Or customers may be solving the problem in a way that makes your entire category less relevant.
Each calls for a different investment. Brand competitive research earns its place in a growth strategy when it helps leaders distinguish among them.
Competitive research means gathering and evaluating evidence about the alternatives customers can choose. Brand competitive research examines how customers perceive those alternatives relative to your brand, and how those perceptions affect choice.
It connects competitive analysis with customer research to answer a commercial question: what is preventing us from winning the business we want?
Competitor research can establish what another company offers, charges, and claims. It cannot, by itself, establish why buyers prefer that company. A prominent message on a competitor’s website tells you what it wants to be known for. Customer evidence tells you whether that message matters or is believed.
That distinction should shape the research brief. “Understand our competitors” is too broad to guide an investment decision. “Determine why we lose consideration among health system decision-makers despite strong outcomes” gives the work a specific purpose.
Before research begins, agree on which decision the findings will inform. Also name the evidence that could change leadership’s mind. If every possible result would lead to the same campaign, the decision has already been made.
These are useful starting hypotheses for research. More than one may be true, and the answer may differ by segment.
Being overlooked means the brand does not enter the customer’s consideration set. That can reflect limited awareness, but it can also reflect an established reputation that excludes the business you now want.
A firm known for serving small organizations may be familiar to enterprise buyers without being seen as an enterprise option. More exposure to the same positioning will not necessarily correct that perception. Research needs to establish what evidence would make the brand a credible contender.
Being rejected means customers consider the brand and choose an alternative. Here, the task is to understand the deciding factor. It may be a perceived performance gap, concern about implementation, or insufficient proof to justify a premium.
Consider an illustrative B2B purchase. A buyer praises your expertise but selects a competitor with a less sophisticated offer because it appears easier to implement. A campaign emphasizing greater expertise could strengthen an attribute the buyer already accepts while leaving the objection untouched.
Being replaced means customers meet the need through a different solution, or decide that solving it is not worth the effort. For an association, that could mean prospective members getting professional advice from an informal network instead of paying for membership.
In that situation, a comparison with peer associations misses part of the competitive problem. Research needs to test why someone would pay for membership when an existing alternative feels sufficient.
Evaluate the alternatives customers actually use or seriously consider. Include direct competitors offering similar products, indirect competitors meeting the same need differently, and the option of doing nothing. Emerging entrants matter when they could change the customer’s expectations or choices.
The core elements are:
Use public sources to establish what is observable. Customer reviews can surface issues worth investigating, but they should not be treated as a representative measure of market opinion. Interviews with buyers and lost prospects can reveal how decisions were made. Quantitative research can test how widely those patterns hold.
Keep competitor claims separate from customer perceptions in the analysis. Otherwise, a company with ambitious messaging can appear stronger than one whose customers consistently validate a less dramatic promise.
Comparison also needs context. An attribute may drive preference in one segment and barely matter in another. A market-wide average can conceal the audience where your brand is strongest, or the one where its weaknesses are most commercially consequential.
A positioning map can reveal territory no competitor appears to occupy. That is a hypothesis about opportunity, not evidence of demand.
An unclaimed benefit may be overlooked. It may also be unclaimed because buyers do not value it, will not pay for it, or cannot distinguish it from an existing offer.
Suppose every provider in a category emphasizes scale, while research suggests customers want more personal attention. That finding does not yet justify repositioning around service. Leaders need to know which customers care enough to switch, what “personal attention” means in practice, and whether delivering it can support the economics of the business.
Separate dissatisfaction from demand. Customers can dislike an aspect of a category and still accept it as a reasonable trade-off. Asking what frustrates them is useful. Understanding whether that frustration changes their choice is more useful for investment.
A potential position deserves serious consideration when customer evidence supports its importance, competitors leave room to establish it, and the organization can deliver it credibly. The cost of delivering it belongs in that assessment.
Research should also test whether an existing strength has room to grow. A familiar advantage may be underrecognized by prospects or poorly demonstrated during the buying process. Building recognition for something the business already does well can be a better use of resources than inventing a new promise.
Begin with the growth decision and the assumptions behind it. Define the priority audience, the desired business outcome, and the uncertainty research needs to resolve.
Then map the relevant alternatives through competitive market research. Review their offers and positioning alongside category developments that could affect customer choice. Use this work to form hypotheses for customer research rather than drawing final conclusions from desk research alone.
Include people who chose competitors, stopped buying, or never seriously considered your brand. Current customers can explain what supports loyalty. They cannot fully explain the business you are failing to attract.
Qualitative research helps uncover the language and reasoning behind choices. Quantitative research can assess the prevalence of those findings and compare priority segments. Choose methods around the decision’s stakes and the evidence needed, rather than using the same research design for every question.
The deliverable should make the resulting choices explicit. For each major finding, leadership should be able to see the recommended action, its supporting evidence, and any uncertainty that still matters.
Some findings will support a positioning change. Others may point to better proof in the sales process or a service issue that messaging cannot fix. Research can also justify leaving the strategy alone. A competitor’s move does not automatically require a response.
Match the measures to the problem diagnosed.
If the brand is being overlooked, track whether priority buyers increasingly consider it for the relevant need. Overall awareness may rise without changing that.
If the brand is being rejected, measure movement in the perceptions that influence selection, alongside qualified win rates or other relevant commercial outcomes.
If customers are choosing a substitute, test whether the offer gives them a compelling reason to adopt or return. Outperforming another provider within a shrinking consideration set is an incomplete measure of progress.
Establish the baseline before activation. Where feasible, use pilots or comparison groups to assess the response. Changes in sales can reflect pricing, distribution, or market conditions, so an improvement after launch does not establish that brand strategy caused it.
Ongoing monitoring should focus on developments capable of changing the investment decision. A new competitor claim may warrant observation. Evidence that buyers have changed their selection criteria may warrant fresh research.
Ask the team to complete this sentence:
“We are losing [specific business] among [specific audience] because [evidence-backed reason]. We will invest in [specific response] and assess it through [relevant measure].”
An inability to fill in the reason is a research gap. An inability to connect the response to that reason is a strategy gap.
At The Brand Consultancy, research and analytics inform recommendations about where a brand can compete and what needs to change for it to win. That evidence guides positioning and activation, with measurement tied to the business objective.
If your team is preparing to respond to a competitor, let’s talk about the decision the research needs to resolve.