Racing Against the Clock
What you don’t know about your competitive position can hurt you. Our client, a major provider of business fiber services, was facing a critical moment without a clear view of the landscape.
With a significant acquisition on the horizon, they faced an urgent question: where did they truly stand against competitors in the eyes of their buyer?
The stakes were high. The deal would close within months, and leadership needed quick wins to strengthen their position heading into the transaction. Traditional competitive research—surveys, lengthy fieldwork, months of analysis—wouldn’t cut it. They needed deep insights, fast. But the challenge wasn’t just speed. To identify meaningful positioning opportunities, the takeaways had to be comprehensive. They needed to understand not just what competitors were saying, but what audiences were hearing and how they were responding.
The client brought us in to close this intelligence gap and surface easy-to-implement positioning tweaks before year-end.
Intelligence From Every Angle
Traditional competitive audits often miss the signal in the noise. Websites and ad campaigns tell you what brands want to say. Then, there’s what media communicates. Harder to capture, but still essential, is what audiences actually hear and how they respond. We needed it all.
Our custom, dual-lens approach: Combine vast unstructured data analysis with a rapid AI-powered competitive assessment to deliver speed without sacrificing depth.
Mining Unstructured Data for Buyer Signals
First, we identified conversations about business fiber services across digital platforms, then applied advanced analytics to focus on the client and its primary competitors. Next, we segmented this unstructured data into three content categories: brand-owned (what companies post), brand-earned (what media and influencers say), and consumer-generated (what customers and prospects discuss organically). Using proprietary AI tools, our researchers analyzed thousands of data points to identify the underlying drivers of choice.
This methodology is unique because of its ability to not only extract those often uncaptured drivers, but also measure how each driver scored against the client’s brand. The result is a set of dimensions that allow us to understand brand preference and consumer behavior more precisely than a simple themes analysis would. Armed with this information, the client knew exactly what their customers care about, and how they were performing relative to the competition—all based on real consumer stories.
AI-Powered Competitive Communications Assessment
Finally, we conducted a comprehensive AI-driven analysis of all brand-generated content (websites and advertising creative; both video and image) from the client and its top competitors. Using the same dimensional framework identified in our unstructured data analysis—those often-overlooked drivers—we scored it all to create an apples-to-apples comparison between the client and their peers. This revealed not just what competitors claimed, but how effectively they were hitting those all-important drivers of choice.
Our layered methodology gave us a complete picture: what buyers care about, who’s delivering on those expectations, and where our client had white space to own.
Doing the Right Things, Missing the Right Words
The research delivered a nuanced answer: our client was winning on substance, but losing on voice.
First, the good news. Across their marketing efforts, the client was successfully reinforcing the core perceptions that matter most to business fiber buyers—reliability, network quality, and infrastructure strength. Their owned content consistently hit these notes, and the market was hearing them. They had a solid foundation.
But here’s what our analysis also revealed: the client’s website was being significantly outperformed by competitors on one critical dimension—support. And support wasn’t a nice-to-have. Our research showed it was a decisive factor in provider choice, particularly for mid-market buyers evaluating competing proposals.
Competitors weren’t necessarily delivering better support, but they were communicating it more effectively. Their websites emphasized partnership language, customer success stories, and responsive service models. Our client’s site focused heavily on network specs and coverage maps—important, but insufficient.
The Opportunity
The research also revealed another challenge: the client’s voice blended into the competitive set. While they were saying the right things, they weren’t saying them distinctively. In a category where technical capabilities often look similar on paper, a differentiated voice and stronger emphasis on partnership could be powerful positioning advantages—and an important way to build brand salience.
These findings gave leadership exactly what they needed by validating their core strategy, while outlining a clear roadmap for high-impact refinements.
Quick Wins, Clear Direction
The research accomplished what traditional methods couldn’t. It delivered comprehensive competitive intelligence in time to act, not just observe.
Based on our findings, the client moved quickly to strengthen support messaging across their website, incorporating partnership language and customer-focused narratives that had been missing. Rather than a wholesale rebrand or positional overhaul, which are expensive and time-consuming, they implemented targeted tweaks that could be executed within their timeline.
Perhaps more importantly, the research gave leadership confidence in their overall positioning heading into the acquisition. They now understood where they were genuinely competitive and where they’d been inadvertently creating perception gaps. The speed of the research meant these insights informed year-end priorities rather than next year’s planning cycle.
The Value Delivered
We delivered strategic clarity under time pressure. The AI-enhanced approach compressed months of traditional research into weeks, giving the client actionable intelligence when it actually mattered. Instead of entering the acquisition uncertain about their competitive standing, they had a clear-eyed view of their strengths and a practical roadmap for improvement—all implemented before the deal closed.
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Want to understand where you really stand against competitors, and what to do about it? Let’s talk about fast, focused competitive intelligence that drives action—not just research reports.
