Competitor monitoring

What the market does, not what it says about itself.

The one thing you do not control

Of the nine ways a company tells machines something about itself, eight are yours to change. The ninth is what other people say about you — reviews, marketplaces, comparison sites — and it is the one you cannot fix by editing a setting.

It is therefore also the one most likely to surprise you.

What we read

• Where competitors are visible and where they are not, and how that has moved.
• What the market is doing rather than what it claims in its own copy.
• What is said about you where you are not the author.

Where the limits are, said out loud

Some of this rests on third-party estimates. Where it does, we say so, and we state the limits as properties of the method rather than as a footnote. An estimate presented as a measurement is worse than no number at all, because a decision gets made on it.

And then what?

Level two: the market picture. It sits beside your own numbers rather than above them — optimising beautifully for a market that has moved is the specific failure this level exists to prevent.

How to start

Tell us what you are trying to fix — the account, the channel, what you have already tried. That is the whole first step.