In a competitive market, your competitors are a key source of insight. By monitoring and analysing individual campaigns and media spend, we helped our client build strategies that improved media spend efficiency and extract insights from competitors.
Over two thousand years ago, the famous Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu wrote in his treatise The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat”. In the modern marketing landscape, this means we need to understand not only what our competitors are doing but also the ‘why’ that drives their actions.
For our consumer goods client, when information on competitors was collected it was spread across the business and kept within team silos, and rarely analysed and not acted upon. This situation meant our client’s marketing strategies did not take their competitors’ actions into account. To help our client learn from their competitors, and their market, for when developing their communication strategy, we implemented an industry tracking framework that included analysis and interactive reporting of monthly competitor media spend across, that was then linked the sales and brand tracking metrics.
In conjunction with the media usage analysis, was an analysis of competitors’ actual campaigns and executions. This content analysis provided insights for predicting competitor behaviour and provided additional insights for communication development, and what types of activity were better at driving business growth.