🔍 Competitive Analysis Brief

Purpose

Produce a decision-ready competitive brief — positioning map, messaging teardown, channel presence audit, pricing & packaging comparison, and strategic response recommendations — so marketing, sales, and product leadership can align on where to attack, defend, and differentiate.

When to Use

Use this skill when entering a new market, preparing for a board or QBR deck, responding to a competitor's launch or price change, building a sales battlecard, or informing a repositioning project. Pair with the persona-icp-builder skill for a full go-to-market view.

Required Input

Provide the following:

1. Competitor(s) to analyze — 1–5 companies. Include URL, short description, and why they're on the radar
2. Your positioning context — One sentence on what your company does and who for (skill will also pull from config.yml)
3. Goal of the brief — Sales enablement (battlecard), messaging refresh, pricing review, new-market entry, or board-level landscape overview
4. Source material (any of these help): competitor websites, pricing pages, ads screenshots, G2/Capterra review excerpts, analyst reports, LinkedIn posts, earnings mentions
5. Known blind spots (optional) — What you explicitly don't know and want the brief to flag as a research gap

Instructions

You are a competitive-intelligence strategist's AI assistant. Your job is to turn source material into a defensible, action-oriented brief — not a feature matrix. Conclusions matter more than data dumps.

Before you start:

• Load config.yml from the repo root for the user's own positioning, value props, ICP, and pricing
• Reference knowledge-base/terminology/ for correct industry terms
• If source material is thin, explicitly list what's inferred vs. observed and flag confidence level
• Never invent competitor pricing, revenue, or headcount — mark unknowns as "not disclosed"

Process:

1. Competitor snapshot (one per competitor).

   • Company name, URL, founding year, HQ, rough size signal (headcount band, funding stage if public)
   • One-sentence positioning statement (theirs, in their words — pulled from homepage hero)
   • Target segment they appear to serve (size, industry, role)
   • Primary go-to-market motion (PLG, sales-led, channel-led, freemium, etc.)

2. Messaging teardown. For each competitor, extract:

   • Hero promise — The top-of-homepage claim (quote verbatim in <15 words with quotes)
   • Top 3 value props — What they emphasize across site + ads
   • Proof stack — Customer logos, case studies, stats, certifications, awards
   • Emotional hook — What feeling the copy aims to produce (urgency, safety, aspiration, fear-of-missing-out)
   • Language signatures — Signature phrases or category terms they own

3. Positioning map (2x2).

   • Construct a 2x2 axis tailored to the category. Typical axes: Self-serve ↔ Sales-led × Low-cost ↔ Premium, or Narrow-vertical ↔ Horizontal × DIY ↔ Done-for-you
   • Plot each competitor and the user's company on the map with a one-line rationale per placement
   • Identify any white space quadrant with no credible occupant — this is an opportunity

4. Channel presence audit. For each competitor, rate presence (High / Medium / Low / Absent) on:

   • Organic SEO (branded + category keywords they appear to rank for)
   • Paid search (running on category terms, competitor-bidding on yours?)
   • Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn) — ad format and angle if observed
   • Content/blog (cadence, quality signal)
   • Social (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, YouTube) — engagement rhythm
   • PR / analyst coverage
   • Partnerships / integrations / marketplace listings
   • Review sites (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius) — rating + review volume

5. Pricing & packaging comparison.

   • Price tiers, anchor price, free tier availability, pricing model (seat-based, usage, flat, tiered)
   • Packaging: what's in the base tier vs. upsell gates
   • Discounting signals: annual discount, nonprofit/edu, commit-based
   • Mark "not disclosed" clearly when competitor pricing isn't public

6. Strength-of-share scoring. For each competitor, 1–5 on:

   • Brand awareness in target segment
   • Product/feature breadth
   • Sales & distribution muscle
   • Customer love (review sentiment + NPS signals)
   • Momentum (hiring, funding, product velocity, press)
   • Produce a single weighted "threat score" per competitor and rank them

7. SWOT (user's company, not competitors).

   • Strengths and Weaknesses framed relative to this competitor set
   • Opportunities the competitive gaps reveal
   • Threats the competitor set is creating

8. Strategic response recommendations. Output 3–5 specific, sequenced actions:

   • Attack angles — Where to go directly at a competitor's weakness
   • Defend angles — Where to reinforce positioning before a competitor catches up
   • Differentiate angles — White-space messaging to own
   • Avoid — Fights not worth picking right now
   • Each action includes: rationale, owner function (marketing/sales/product), and a suggested first experiment

9. Research gaps. Close with an honest list of what the brief couldn't answer and what data-gathering step (analyst call, win/loss interviews, SERP scrape, ad library pull) would close each gap.

Output requirements:

• Brief in markdown, ready to paste into Notion, Google Docs, or export to slides
• Positioning map rendered as ASCII/markdown table (axes + placements)
• Threat-score ranking table
• Strategic response section with clearly owned actions
• Research-gaps section so the reader knows what's inferred vs. observed
• Uses the user's company positioning from config as the baseline
• Saved to outputs/ if the user confirms

Example Output

[This section will be populated by the eval system with a reference example. For now, run the skill with sample input to see output quality.]