Somebody handed me a competitive audit last week. Fourteen logos on a white field, sorted onto a two-by-two with premium and accessible on one axis and traditional and modern on the other. Every logo sat in a different quadrant, which is a small miracle of arrangement. The client's own logo was up and to the right, alone, in the good corner.
I asked what the deck predicted. The room got quiet in a way I recognized, because I have made this exact deck, more than once, on a deadline, at an agency, for money.
A competitive audit is supposed to be an argument about what happens next. What we mostly produce is a seating chart.
Describing where your rivals currently sit tells you nothing about what any of them would do if you moved, which is the only thing a competitive audit is actually for.
The two-by-two has a specific failure built into it. It freezes everyone. It renders a market as a still photograph and then invites you to find the empty space, as though the empty space would stay empty for the eighteen months it takes you to get there. It will not. The reason the corner is open is usually that somebody stronger tried it and retreated, or that nobody wants what lives there.
Three questions I would rather see on a slide than a logo grid.
One. If we cut price twelve percent on our lead item, who matches us, how fast, and can they afford to hold it longer than we can? That is a real number and somebody in finance can help you find it.
Two. What has each competitor actually done in the last two years, not what does their positioning statement claim? Read the hiring. Read the packaging changes. Read where the money went. Behavior is the only honest signal a company gives off.
Three. Which of them is structurally unable to follow us? Patagonia can make a sustainability claim a fast fashion company cannot copy without dismantling its supply chain. That is the good kind of advantage, the kind that costs a rival something real to match.
Behavior is the only honest signal a company gives off.
Everything else is set dressing. If your audit cannot survive the question of what they will do about it, you have not audited anything, you have made a poster of the industry and hung it in a conference room.
I rewrote the deck at Ovation on Tuesday, eight logos instead of fourteen, and a page of predictions I will be judged on in June. Which is uncomfortable, and correct.