March 2026 · Competitive Strategy
Your competitor analysis is backwards.
Screenshots of their ads tell you what they did. Strategy requires knowing why — and what they've bet they can afford to ignore.
March 2026 · Competitive Strategy
Screenshots of their ads tell you what they did. Strategy requires knowing why — and what they've bet they can afford to ignore.
Every competitive audit I've ever inherited looks the same: a deck of screenshots. Their homepage. Their latest campaign. Their packaging refresh, their Instagram grid, their tagline in 48-point type with a note that says "leaning playful." It's diligent, it's tidy, and it's a museum tour: here's what the competitors made, admire it, moving on.
The problem isn't effort. The problem is direction. Outputs are downstream of positioning, so studying outputs means studying conclusions without ever seeing the argument. You end up knowing what everyone did last quarter and nothing about what they'll do next, which is the only part that matters, because your strategy has to live in the future alongside theirs.
Every positioning is a bet with two halves: who we're for, and who we're willing to lose. The second half is the informative one. A competitor's ads will tell you who they're courting. Only the pattern across everything (pricing, channel, product line, who they hire, what they discontinue) tells you who they've decided to abandon. That abandoned ground is your actual map.
When I ran the competitive work for Blue Mountain's brand foundation, the useful finding wasn't anything on a competitor's website. It was structural: every resort in the set was chasing the destination traveler (the fly-in, bucket-list skier) because that's where the prestige was. Which meant the drive-up regional visitor, the family two hours away who comes four times a winter, was being quietly deserted by the entire category. Nobody's ads said that. Their collective behavior did. That desertion became the opportunity.
The discipline I use: for each serious competitor, write the strategy memo they never showed you. Not a parody, a sincere reconstruction. What do they believe about the customer that would make their last eight moves rational? What would have to be true about the market for their bet to pay off? Do this honestly and competitors stop looking like a wall of creative output and start looking like a handful of testable beliefs.
Then the interesting question surfaces on its own: which of those beliefs do you think is wrong? That's your opening. If you don't think any of their beliefs are wrong, that's a finding too: it means you're about to compete on execution alone, and you should at least walk in knowing it.
The other half of backwards analysis: treating category conventions as laws instead of as bets everyone made together. List everything the whole category does the same way: the visual codes, the claims, the channel mix, the tone. For each one, ask: is this a rule because customers demand it, or a habit because someone did it first and everyone flinched into formation?
Most conventions are habits. And a habit shared by the whole category is a differentiation opportunity sitting in plain sight, pre-validated by the fact that nobody's customer ever asked for it. The screenshot deck can't find these, because in the screenshot deck, sameness reads as confirmation that everyone knows something. Usually nobody knows anything. They're all just watching each other.
Take your last competitive audit and count the slides that would change a decision, the ones that make a claim about a competitor's belief, their bet, or the customer they've abandoned. If the count is low, flip the frame. Fewer screenshots, more reconstructed memos. Less "what does their brand look like," more "what would have to be true for this to work." Your competitors' outputs are the least interesting thing about them. The logic underneath is where the strategy is.