What to compare when researching your competitors

Competitor research usually goes wrong in the same way. Someone opens a spreadsheet, lists the eight businesses that come to mind, writes a paragraph of impressions about each, and closes it. Nothing gets decided, because nothing was compared on the same terms.

Useful competitor work is narrower and more repeatable than that. You define a small set of businesses you are genuinely in a market with, compare them on the same handful of dimensions, record what you saw and when you saw it, and finish with something you can act on this quarter.

Start with the customer, not the industry

Your competitors are the options one specific buyer weighs up when they have the problem you solve. That usually covers three types: businesses offering roughly what you offer, businesses solving the same problem in a different way, and the option of doing nothing at all. The third is often the strongest competitor and it almost never appears in the spreadsheet.

Keep the set to five or six. A longer list is not more thorough, it just means each entry gets less attention and the whole thing becomes too heavy to update. Include one business a stage ahead of you and one a stage behind: the first shows what the next phase looks like, the second shows what you have already moved past.

Six things worth comparing

Recording it as a matrix

Businesses across the top, the six dimensions down the side. Resist writing paragraphs in the cells. Each one should hold a short factual note and, where the wording matters, a direct quotation of their own words. Add two more rows underneath: the date you looked, and the source you looked at.

Then read the matrix across the rows rather than down the columns. A column tells you about one business. A row tells you what the market has quietly agreed on, and that is where the openings are. If five of six businesses describe themselves using the same three words, those words have stopped carrying meaning for the buyer, and using them a fourth time will not help you.

Built this way, the matrix can be refreshed in about an hour every quarter, which is the only thing that makes it worth building in the first place.

The mistakes that waste the work

• Comparing yourself with businesses your customers are not choosing between, usually much larger ones. It is discouraging and it tells you nothing about your own market.
• Recording impressions instead of evidence. Their branding is stronger is not comparable across a table. Their home page names the industry they serve in the first line is.
• Treating it as a one-off exercise. A matrix with no dates in it becomes misleading within months, and nobody can tell which parts have gone stale.
• Copying what you find. The point of seeing where the market is crowded is to avoid the crowd, not to join it more loudly.
• Leaving out the option of doing nothing, which is what a large share of buyers actually choose.

Where the evidence comes from

Everything above can be gathered from public material: the businesses' own sites, their listings, their social accounts, review platforms, and a search run the way a customer would run it. Keep the source next to the finding so the matrix stays checkable by someone who was not there when you built it.

When you need something about the market rather than about a named company, go to the body that published the figure rather than to an article quoting it. Most countries run a national statistics office and a public company register, both free to search and stable enough to cite in a document that will be read again next year.