A deck landed in my inbox Monday morning with a file name that told me everything: LANDSCAPE_v7_FINAL.key. Forty one slides. Thirty eight of them were screenshots of other people's homepages, cropped at the fold, arranged four to a grid, each one captioned with the company name and nothing else.
August does this. Q4 planning kickoffs stack up, every new engagement opens with a competitive landscape, and somebody spends nine days with a browser window and the screenshot tool open until they have enough rectangles to fill a section divider.
The deck was beautiful. It was also empty.
Nobody who sat through that presentation could have told me what a single one of those competitors actually believed, who they were built for, or what they would refuse to do for money. We knew their hero image sizes. We knew their button colors. We knew, in aggregate, that the category likes sans serif type and photographs of hands.
A competitive audit is not a record of what your competitors look like, it is an argument about where the open ground is.
Three things fix this, and none of them take longer than the screenshotting did.
One, audit claims, not layouts. Write down the single sentence each competitor is actually making about why they exist, in their own words, pulled from the About page and the careers page and the founder interview. Put those sentences in one column. When four of the five say some version of craft and community, you have found the crowded middle, and you have found it in an afternoon.
Two, audit behavior. What a brand does under pressure tells you more than what it says on a homepage. Patagonia's repair program is a position. Liquid Death's refusal to ever be tasteful is a position. Whether a competitor discounts hard in the fourth quarter is a position, and you can watch it from the outside for free.
Three, end in a recommendation. Every audit slide should carry a sentence that starts with so what. If a slide cannot support that sentence, it is not evidence, it is wallpaper, and it belongs in an appendix nobody opens.
If a slide cannot support that sentence, it is not evidence, it is wallpaper, and it belongs in an appendix nobody opens.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I know why it happens. Screenshots feel like progress. They are visible, countable proof of effort, and they let everyone postpone the uncomfortable part, which is having an opinion in front of a client who is paying for exactly that.
Truffles walked across the printed version of that landscape last night, sat down on slide nineteen, and started washing a paw. Barnaby ignored it entirely. Between the two of them, that is a more decisive read on the competition than the deck managed in forty one pages.