The competitor intelligence survey template

It’s a fact of life that no brand exists in a vacuum. Our economy, by its nature, includes competitive markets, some more saturated than others, but all with multiple players operating.

As such, it’s vital to the success of your brand that you both understand and appreciate who your competitors are, as well as the value of their products and services on offer.

You may already feel that you know your competitors, and that your unique value proposition is clear, but are consumers also recognising these benefits? And are there new players in the market that you haven’t noticed yet? We believe the best way to know is to ask. Not by looking at a dashboard that draws on your existing customer data, but the wider consumer market – all those potential customers that are still to be won over.

Without this intelligence you’re automatically on the back foot and forced into a responsive business strategy. Why not be one step ahead and use competitor intelligence direct from consumers to put yourself in the driving seat?

In fact, the only way to stay ahead of your competition is to understand it, actively challenge it, and use this intelligence as an advantage over the other brands operating in your field.

Why is competitor intelligence important?

Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself, your opinion of your brand is biased. As such, your view of the market is skewed, and external data is required in order for you to understand the real-world, unbiased trends of the market you’re operating in.

In this case, if you want to understand and get ahead of your competitors (as all good companies should!) then you’ll need significant data representing the thoughts and opinions of the consumers of your market. Why they value one brand over another, why they’re loyal to one product, or why they never buy the same brand twice.

Luckily, you’re in exactly the right place for this.

Our comprehensive Competitor Intelligence survey template offers the necessary mix of quantitative and qualitative data to show the popular rankings of brands within your market, and explain the reasons motivating these scores. Competitor analysis tools like this template are key to gaining valuable insights into your neighbor’s activities.

It’s with this intelligence that you’ll gain a vital edge over your competitors, able to understand consumer motivations and improve the reasons why your brand is preferable over others.

How do you run a competitor intelligence survey?

At Attest we’ve made it incredibly easy for you to gain these insightful data points in record time.

Using our competitor intelligence survey you’ll only need to enter four unique details to begin gathering the data that can lend you a helping hand in winning market share over your fiercest competitors.

By entering your product or service type, your brand name, the names of your main competitors and the expected purchase motivators, we’ll transform this data into a pre-designed and optimised survey to provide you with the answers you need in order to take control of the market.

The metrics recorded within the competitor intelligence survey include:

• Unprompted brand recall and key words associated with your own brand and that of competitors
• Current market share
• Key purchase drivers in your market (and how they’re changing over time)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) and reasons motivating this score

The results of this comprehensive report gift you an edge over your competitors who may not be conducting comparative research into the opinions of the marketplace.

Other considerations

Before embarking on a competitor intelligence survey project it is vital that you are able to identify your main competitors. (Part of the competitor intelligence template also looks at unprompted recall, which helps you spot new and emerging competitors you’re unaware of, but it’s good to focus your a deep-dive on your most established competitors).

A prerequisite to this is that you understand the real life uses for your product or service. So often, products and services are utilised in the real world for purposes which are not their designed intent (how many homes are actually wallpapered with Bubble Wrap, as it was originally intended?).

As such, before you launch into a competitor intelligence survey, consider running a jobs to be done survey, to understand the uses consumers are putting your product to, and identify which other brands are operating in the same market. This may just uncover an unexpected insight that encourages a shift in your brand purpose to more closely fit your market.

How to use the competitor intelligence survey template

The survey design step has been taken care of for you, so that you need only enter four details in order to start gathering high-quality responses.

Once you enter these details the template will allow you to collect vital quantitative data and illuminating qualitative data to gift you the full picture of your brand’s position and perception compared to competitors within your specific market.

Entering your company name and the name of competitor brands allows both data types to be collected:

Our template will automatically design your survey to produce engaged, high quality responses that will give you confidence in the data collected, and can validate business strategies in response to, and in order to challenge your competitors.

We’ve created a comprehensive guide to walk you through your next consumer intelligence, from start to finish. You can download the full guide to survey creation here, to be well on your way to understanding consumer preferences, your relative position and perception within the market, and owning the tools you need to make beneficial changes to your business strategy.

Download the Attest competitor intelligence survey template or learn more about competitive market research by getting in touch with us.