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Many think of themselves as “strategic”. But are making considered decisions, as if they’re blindfolded in a casino. Real strategy starts with one question nobody asks:
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LinkedIn isn’t just a resume hub—it’s a live feed of strategic intent. By mapping job titles, hires, and post patterns, even small teams can detect competitive shifts early and act faster than larger rivals.
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Question: What is cognitive bias, and how does it sabotage competitor analysis?
Answer: Cognitive bias leads teams to misread competitor behaviour by building narratives based on feelings or assumptions rather than verified data. This distorts strategy, leading businesses to act on internal stories rather than external realities.
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The Two-Path Trap in Competitor Analysis: Weekly Winning Strategies
Most competitor analysis treats business problems like coin flips—two sides, one choice. The companies winning right now see problems as prisms with dozens of refracting angles, and they're capturing opportunities everyone else is missing.
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To detect competitor pricing changes before they’re announced publicly, monitor front-end pricing pages, metadata schema updates, hidden coupon URLs, ad copy tests, and early customer feedback across review sites. Tools like VisualPing, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and B2B mystery shopping services help identify pricing tests or shadow rollouts weeks before they’re officially revealed.
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The Move Makes No Sense: Until You Ask This One Question: Weekly Winning Strategies
You’re knee-deep in competitor analysis. You’ve got tabs open like a conspiracy theorist. SEC filings. Product changelogs. Archived pricing pages. CEO Twitter rants. You’re not here for inspiration—you’re hunting for asymmetry. And then it hits you:
You find something that doesn’t add up.
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Always the First Steps — Let’s Talk About Competitive Analysis Like It Actually Matters: Weekly Winning Strategies
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How Founders Are Screwing Up Competitive Intelligence Without Even Realising It
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Outthink Later: Why Good Competitive Intelligence Ignores Better Judgment: Weekly Winning Strategies
Ask People to Work Against Their Better Judgment That’s the play. That’s how winners think in markets they weren’t invited into.
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Competitive Intelligence keep it simple to start: Weekly Winning Strategies
Avoiding what’s easy can be a cop-out. You’ll hear people say, “Take the hard path. That’s where growth happens.” Fine. Lift weights, climb a mountain, or meditate silently for 30 days. But when it comes to understanding a market, building a business, or tracking your competitors? Ignore the obvious stuff, and you miss the gold right before you.
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If you’re considering using Generative AI (Chatgpt, Gemini, Claud, etc) or monitoring newswires and press releases, that’s fine. However, you do it with the same data as your competitors; same assumptions and where’s your competitive advantage? The only advantage here is if your competitors are not bothering to look. Or you have found a magic prompt from an AI prompt guru that gives you what you need.
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The Right Competitive Intelligence Questions: Weekly Winning Strategies
The right competitive intelligence questions and the good questions aren’t just intellectual exercises or quick lists with little thought.
“Erm, what’s their turnover? What’s their pricing? And erm what is their strategy?”
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Want to build this kind of strategic muscle? Start by training your intuition. Use data as a flashlight, not a map. And remember:
Insight > Information. Always.
Now, go break some dashboards.
Let’s talk…
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You’re Not Losing to a Better Product. You’re Losing to a Better Perception. We like to believe that customers are rational. They think in straight lines. But in the real world? They zigzag. They don’t want what they say they want. And they don’t buy what they think they buy. And they don’t switch because of what you think is a “better product.”
They switch because something feels right. More aspirational. More aligned with how they see themselves or want to be seen. That’s why competitive intelligence that relies too heavily on what customers say is broken by design. Let’s break this down, reframe it, and show you how to build a stronger competitor and market analysis playbook.
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Case Study: B2B Mystery Shopping Software Case Study: HR & Payroll Insights
When evaluating HR and payroll software competitors for a client preparing to expand operations, we conducted a comprehensive B2B mystery shopping software exercise. We aimed to assess leading software vendors on key decision-making factors, including automation, compliance, scheduling, customer support, and pricing structures. By engaging directly with sales teams and product demonstrations under the guise of a potential buyer, we extracted detailed insights that would be challenging to obtain through standard research.
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The data trap: When more isn’t better. It’s just noisier: Weekly Winning Strategies
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Enjoy the silence: Why What You Don’t Know Can Beat You: Weekly Winning Strategies
“Evidence is the list of things you have got. What about the evidence you haven’t got?” is a quote often attributed to Carl Sagan. Or was it cosmologist Martin Rees? Interesting quote about looking for the silence.
“Evidence is the list of things you have got.”
Sure. That’s how most people play the competitive intelligence game. They gather what’s easily available:
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I recently had the opportunity to walk around and talk to stand holders at the Digitial Accountancy Show. I know, who said competitive intelligence is dull, eh? It was an excellent and well-presented show. What struck me was that most solutions on show were basically offering the same thing. Some had better branding than others. Some proclaimed that AI (the same product as last year, but an algorithm has been added to the product and AI placed onto the branding or proclaiming the best customer experience) was going to change how we do things. And maybe they will.
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Whether you’re a solopreneur, a tech founder, a Marketing Director, a product manager or a market analyst buried in dashboards and pretending it all means something. Choices define how much control you have over your position in the market. It’s about outsmarting competitors with strategic intel.
Especially when the stakes are high, and the data is murky.
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Why Your Cheaper Pricing Won’t Win the Market (And What Will): Weekly Winning Strategies
Let’s talk about pricing wars. You see it everywhere—companies trying to undercut their competitors by fractions of a percentage point, hoping customers will jump ship for that tiny savings. We see it a lot with our B2B mystery shopping exercises. Pricing is always the first thing a client thinks about, but there is much more to collect, analyse and act on. Cheaper pricing is rarely the answer.
