Competitive Analysis: Where to Be Alike, Where to Be Different
Know who else is in your story.
THEN FIND THE ROLE THAT'S YOURS.
This is Episode 7 of Frame Your Story: The Storyteller’s Approach to Brand Building – a nine-episode series from Synergetic Media applying Hollywood narrative principles to business brand building. Each episode covers one building block of a complete brand story framework. Episode 7 meets the rest of the cast – your competitors.
The complete series has earned five industry awards: two Gold Viddy Awards and three Gold Hermes Creative Awards in Ethical Use of AI, Thought Leadership Content, and AI-Assisted Video Production.
Watch the full series on YouTube, or continue through individual episodes here.
Where to Be Alike, Where to Be Different: Competitive Analysis for Your Brand
Every great story has more than one character. Alongside the hero, storytellers rely on a supporting cast, and one of the most useful characters in it is the foil: a character whose contrast makes another character’s qualities stand out. A hero is easier to see clearly when there’s someone different standing next to them.
In Episode 6 we got to know the hero of your story, your customer. Now we meet the rest of the cast. In your brand story, your competitors are the foils. They’re the backdrop your customer sees you against, whether you’ve thought about it or not, and knowing them is how you understand your own role.
What Competitive Analysis Is For
That’s the job of competitive analysis: studying everything you can see about your competitors’ marketing and positioning, and how well they’re doing it. It tells you two things: the bar you need to meet or exceed, and where you can carve out a position that’s uniquely yours. Put simply, where to be alike and where to be different.
Where We Start
In order to understand a brand’s position, you have to understand its competitors’ positioning. That’s why competitive analysis is one of the first steps in almost every marketing engagement we take on, right alongside discovery. Before we talk about messaging, design, or a website, we want to know the landscape the client is actually standing in.
We even do a lighter version before we write a proposal. Looking at a prospective client next to two to four named competitors shows us the gaps, what the client already does well, and where they need work. That way the proposal is built around their real situation from the start.
What You Can See About Their Marketing
A useful competitive analysis looks at everything you can see about a competitor’s marketing and positioning, and how well they’re doing it:
- Their message: what they say about themselves, what they promise, and who they’re speaking to.
- Their website: how it’s crafted, how deep it goes, and whether it’s backed by case studies, project galleries, and real proof.
- Their social media: which channels they’re active on, how often they post, and how well it’s done.
- Their search strength: where they rank, whether AI tools mention them, and their Domain Rating, Ahrefs‘ measure of the strength of a site’s backlink profile.
- Their reviews: how many they have, how recent they are, and their ratings, all set against yours.
- Their visual identity and collateral, online and in print.
All of it is in plain view, which is exactly why it matters. Your customers can see it too.
Where to Be Alike
Some of what you find sets the bar. These are the areas where customers compare you directly, often without realizing they’re doing it, and where you can’t afford to fall behind: the depth of your website, your review count, your social presence, your search strength.
Meeting your competitors in these areas is the floor. Exceeding them is the goal. Being as good as the competition keeps you in the running. Being better gives the customer a reason to choose you.
Picture a prospect comparing three companies. Two have well-developed websites full of case studies and project photos. The third has a three- or five-page site. Whatever the quality of the work behind it, that third site isn’t going to compare favorably.
Domain Rating is a good example of why the bar is relative. It isn’t a number you hit once and forget. A rating that would be strong in one market can be modest in another, depending on who you’re up against. What matters is where you stand next to your competitors, and you want to be at or above them.
Where to Be Different
The other half of the analysis is just as important. What your competitors are saying tells you what’s already been claimed. If every company in your market leads with quality work and great service, saying the same thing makes you one more voice in the chorus. Saying something they aren’t is how you stand out.
This is where your unique selling proposition lives. Your USP is the thing you do, or the way you do it, that your competitors don’t, and that your customer genuinely cares about. Competitive analysis is how you find it with confidence instead of guessing at it, because you can see exactly what ground is taken and what’s still open. Your message should claim that open ground clearly. A USP earns its name when no competitor could put it on their own website unchanged.
Storytellers use this kind of contrast all the time. Watson’s steady, ordinary good sense is what makes Sherlock Holmes’s brilliance so visible. In Toy Story, Woody’s worn, old-fashioned charm is what makes Buzz Lightyear’s shiny newness land. Apple’s Get a Mac campaign brought the same idea into marketing from 2006 to 2009: Mac and PC side by side, every difference made visible through the contrast. You don’t need to name your competitors to use the principle. You just need to know them well enough to know how you look next to them.
Norse Building Products
Norse Building Products had built a strong business over many years on long-term relationships. As they set out to reach new customers beyond that circle, the question was how to stand out in a market where they were less well known. Studying the competitors is what answered it. It showed us where the open ground was, a place in the sandbox no one else had claimed, so Norse could take a distinct position of its own.
Meet the Bar, Then Stand Apart
Your competitors are part of your story. Knowing them tells you where to be alike and where to be different. Meet the bar at minimum, exceed it wherever you can, and stand apart where it’s essential: your unique selling proposition. That’s what the U is for.