Category: Business Intelligence

5 Methods to Better Understand Your Competitors and Your Market
5 Methods to Better Understand Your Competitors and Your Market 

5 Methods to Better Understand Your Competitors and Your Market 

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In an increasingly complex and fast-changing business environment, relying on a vague understanding of the competition is no longer enough. Staying competitive requires a deep understanding of your competitors—their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, intentions, and more. 

A healthy dose of humility is essential: you need to ‘’read’’ your market objectively, which means recognizing that your competitors have different strengths, face different challenges and competitive pressures. 

Here are five strategic approaches to sharpen your competitive insights: 

1. The Transposed SWOT Analysis: Put Yourself in Your Competitor’s Shoes 

A management classic, the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is typically used to assess your own company. But applying it from your main competitor’s perspective turns it into a powerful strategic tool. 

Step into your competitor’s shoes and consider: 

  • Strengths: strong brand recognition, operational performance, innovation, competitive advantages. 
  • Weaknesses: outdated tech, overreliance on one market, weak brand image. 
  • Opportunities: emerging trends, untapped markets, favorable regulatory changes. 
  • Threats: economic crises, new regulations, shifting consumer behavior. 

The goal is to remain objective! A transposed SWOT analysis can help you anticipate your competitors’ next moves and adapt your own strategy to avoid being caught off guard.  

2. Porter’s Five Forces: Understanding Industry Pressures 

Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework deepens your market analysis by evaluating five essential dynamics: 

  • Rivalry among existing competitors: market saturation level, offer differentiation 
  • Threat of new entrants: market access, barriers to entering the market 
  • Suppliers’ bargaining power:  dependence to suppliers and supplier concentration 
  • Customers’ bargaining power: Ease for customers to switch from one provider to another 
  • Threat of substitutes: Innovations or emerging alternatives  

This tool helps you see your competitors within their ecosystem and understand how a seemingly strong player may actually be strategically vulnerable. 

👉 Recommended reading: The Five Forces – Harvard Business School 

3. Digital Competitive Intelligence: Continuous Monitoring 

With the growing digitization of business, competitive intelligence has evolved. Today, there’s a wealth of publicly available data useful for strategic analysis: 

  • Website analysis, blogs, white papers, case studies 
  • Social media tracking: engagement, key messaging, ad campaigns 
  • Job postings: clues about future priorities 
  • Patent filings and publications 

Several online tools are available to help in gathering information. An active watch will allow to anticipate product launches, any repositioning and new market entrances. 

4. Active Market Listening: Stay Tuned to What’s Happening 

Active listening is a powerful lever for insight: 

  • Talk to your clients: What do they think of your competitors? How do they perceive your strengths? What trends do they see emerging? 
  • Conduct client interviews or audits: Get an in-depth understanding of their expectations and perceptions  
  • Attend key trade shows and conferences: Speak with clients and competitors, listen to presentations 

These kinds of interactions enrich your understanding and give you a more nuanced view of your competitive landscape. 

5. Competitive Mapping: Visualize to Strategize 

A strategic map helps you position your competitors based on two or three relevant factors (price, perceived quality, innovation, geographic coverage, etc.). 

It allows you to: 

  • Identify strategic whitespaces (‘’blue oceans’’) 
  • Spot saturated areas (“red oceans”) 
  • Understand your competitors’ positioning axes 
  • Reassess your own market position 

It’s also a valuable conversation-starter internally—ask your sales, customer service, or marketing teams for their perspectives. 

👉 Recommended reading: Mapping Your Competitive Position – Harvard Business Review 

Analyze to Act, Collaborate, or Pivot 

Understanding your competitors isn’t just about beating them. It’s about learning, getting inspired, anticipating, partnering—and sometimes pivoting smartly. 

When done well, competitive analysis becomes a strategic skill that supports multiple business functions: innovation, marketing, finance, HR, and even sustainability. 

It should be ongoing, structured, and embedded across the organization. By investing in deeper market understanding, companies can implement more resilient, informed and bold strategies that are aligned with reality.  

Artificial Intelligence and Market Research: A Good Match?

Artificial Intelligence and Market Research: A Good Match?

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How should you, or can you use AI’s immense potential of when it comes to market studies?

First and foremost, companies – whether targeting consumers (BtoC) or other businesses (BtoB) – must constantly make strategic decisions. These include:

  1. Whether or not to launch a new product
  2. Market segment selection
  3. Positioning or differentiation definition
  4. Identifying expansion opportunities
  5. Price optimization

Market research can be time-consuming and costly. Sometimes, timing is crucial if you want to take advantage of certain favorable circumstances. It’s therefore crucial to define the questions to be addressed and to structure the research according to actual needs.

Before carrying out market research, you need to define the questions you want answered. Then we identify the information we already have and define the methodology for obtaining the missing answers. Here are a few examples of potential sources of information:

  • Official statistics
  • Expert interviews
  • Literature reviews and competitive analyses
  • Surveys and focus groups

 

Artificial intelligence: a complementary but not infallible tool

Depending on the time available, the use of AI should be seen as an additional resource in the available arsenal of tools. For example, in the context of market research, artificial intelligence tools could be used to:

  • Quickly identify relevant sources of information
  • Linking concepts and trends
  • Generate hypotheses on market strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and opportunities and threats in the market
  • Establish chronologies of events and identify influencing factors (regulations, barriers to entry, etc.).
  • Identify potential competitors

However, it is clear that artificial intelligence tools have generated “hallucinations” that involve invented facts, information that is more or less realistic, incomplete or simply untrue.

Sources can be biased, subject to external influences or unfounded. But sometimes, information generated by artificial intelligence can greatly speed up the market research process. You need to be able to analyze the information provided by artificial intelligence and validate its authenticity and veracity. Rigor is essential!

Artificial intelligence will never replace human insights gained from customer testimonials, experts or contextual analysis. Market research is not just a matter of accumulating data, but requires a detailed understanding of the economic, social and political context.

In short, professional rigor means generating the fullest, truest and most useful analysis possible. Artificial intelligence can greatly speed up the market research process, but it should not replace human intelligence as consequences deriving from some decisions can be very significant. An independent market research can lend a helping hand!