THE AI ADVANTAGE Issue No. 16

AI Ran a Week-Long Competitor Analysis in 30 Minutes

THIS WEEK IN AI

Million-Dollar Brands Study Their Competition, so why aren’t you?

The big brands pulling in millions all know exactly where they stand when it comes to their competition. They know who their competitors are, they know the angle those competitors are running, they know the exact client they are targeting and catering to, and they know the one thing that sets them apart from the rest. They learn this by completing competitive research. Sure, the big brands have teams of people to complete all their tasks, but you have AI. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re an author, speaker, coach, or personal brand; you are just as much the CEO of your business as anyone with a strategy department. The good news is that now, instead of a strategy department with multiple team members to pay for, you have AI! And when AI is given the right information, it can do a damn good job with your competitor analysis. 

You should get to know your market the same way the big names do. You should know who your competitors are, what angle they're running, who they're trying to attract, and where YOUR lane is, the one that's already yours. That is not a big-business luxury. It's the key to standing out without needing to reinvent the wheel.

The only reason most people skip it is that, until pretty recently, doing it properly took the better part of a week and a level of expertise most of us don't have.

THE TEST

First, we ran our own business analysis 

We took a competitive analysis, and we ran it on our own business as the guinea pig. (If we're going to hand you something, we're going to run it on ourselves first. That's the deal.)

We built a prompt (left it for you at the bottom for you) that turns Claude (or ChatGPT) into a brand positioning strategist. It interviews you about your business, then it goes out with web search and researches your actual competitors, and then it lays the whole thing out. Who they are, what they promise, who they're talking to, what they stand for, and the big one, where the gap is, leaving you an opportunity to step in and outshine your competition.

Watching it break our competitors down one by one was sort of fascinating. You THINK you know your market. You've got a vague sense of who's out there and what they do. But seeing it written out side by side, this one's a template shop, this one's aspirational and never says anything with an edge, this one's talking to a totally different buyer than we are, it made the whole picture click in a way it never had before.

I also designed this analysis to help identify our unique angle. Our brand enemy (the belief we're actually against). The thing we've been a little scared to say out loud about our industry. Who we do NOT want as a client, and what that reveals about what we believe. Those questions are hard, and a person can go their whole business life without ever answering them.

THE SURPRISE

We Found Confidence In the Process

We went in thinking it was a marketing exercise, but when we were done we came out feeling a heck of a lot more confident about our entire business and what we have to offer. We felt like we had an angle we can talk about and promote that will sound different from everyone else on social media. 

There is something about seeing where everyone else is standing, and realizing there's an open spot, and it happens to be the exact spot you're already standing in you just didn’t see it to be able to call it out! When you can see it, you stop second-guessing yourself and stop worrying about how you are ever going to outshine those who have been in business twice as long. You get to lean into your actual angle. And the best part is you don’t need to reinvent yourself or your business. There is something you do that no one else doees but you may just not have identified it or named it. With this research, you can see it clearly as day and it makes you feel like you actually don’t have any competition at all.

That is not a small thing. And if it did that for us, people who spend our days thinking about this stuff, imagine what it does for someone looking hard at their market for the very first time.

REAL TALK

AI Named a Competitor That Wasn't Actually One

Okay, the honest part, because this newsletter is nothing without it.

If you don't give the AI your competitors, it will pick its own. And some of them will not actually be your competitors.

When we ran ours, it pulled a few names, and I had to sit there and go, "OK, hold on, that one's not really us." One of them, Tonic, is more of a template shop than a done-for-you option (they do have designers who can connect you, but it's a different animal than what we do). So on paper the AI saw "website stuff, similar-ish audience" and lumped them in, when they're really not competing for the same client we are. Sure they are in our space and it’s important to know what they are doing, their brand enemy, everything they stand for. But it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. In fact, many of them weren’t. And most of them won’t be for you. Which can also be a good thing. It helps you see how you ARE different. So it’s not a BAD thing to pull competitors that aren’t the same, but it does mean that you still have to be the expert in the room.

The tool does an enormous amount of the heavy lifting, the research, the mapping, the analysis, but YOU are the one who knows your industry well enough to say "she's not actually my competitor," or "these two look the same to an outsider but they're worlds apart." That judgment is a big part of what makes your positioning yours. The AI can hand you the raw material. You're still the strategist.

(And sorting out who is and isn't a real competitor is part of the value, because it forces you to get clear on what lane you're actually in. You may even find out you thought you were in one category but were actually in a totally different one.) It’s kind of like the company my husband works for, Scenthound. They are a service for dog grooming, nail trims, haircuts, and more. But somewhere along the way they either realized or made the conscious decision that they are not in the “pet grooming business” they are in the pet WELLNESS business. Because they do so much MORE than grooming. They keep a log of your pets health. They offer supplements and focus on helping the owner care of their pet in a way that keeps them as healthy as possible. And come to find out there really aren’t any competitors in that space, yet…. So now that they have established they are in a totally different category, and actually created the category they don’t have any competition and can rush the market before it becomes saturated and be the leader in the space. 

BY THE NUMBERS

What if you could have your top five competitors fully profiled before lunch?

Real competitor research, done the right way, means finding five competitors, actually reading through each of their websites and socials, taking notes on how each one positions itself across a dozen different angles, mapping where everybody sits, and then writing it all up into something you can actually use.

If you hired a brand strategist to do that properly, it's the kind of thing they'd scope across a few weeks, depending on how much time they could give it, and you'd pay around $3,000-$5,000. Most of us never do it at all, because it's tedious and it's really hard to be objective about your own market.

Claude ran the whole thing in about thirty minutes of back and forth.

YOU CAN TRY THIS TOO

Run the Brand Angle Finder.

Ready for the prompt? This is the same one we ran on ourselves.

A few things before you paste it in.

Run it in Claude if you can, with web search on (it usually is by default). That's what lets it look up your real competitors instead of guessing. At the end it builds you a report you can save as a PDF, and Claude renders that beautifully. If you are using ChatGPT you can still run this there, it just won’t spit you out a pretty PDF to save. Butt pretty doesn’t pay, the positioning info does. 

Have your website and social handles ready to paste, and if you already know a few of your competitors, keep their names handy so it's not guessing. (Remember our lesson from above. If it picks its own, double-check they're actually your competitors.)

Answer honestly, not the way you think you're supposed to. The generic answer won't find your angle. If you have never thought about your brand enemy, or what you say that no one else does, it may take you a little longer. The extra time is worth it to get a true analysis you can use!

Treat what it gives you as a strong first draft. It'll surface an angle that's already inside your business, but you know your voice and your clients better than any tool does.

Here it is.

THE BRAND ANGLE FINDER

You are a brand positioning strategist who helps business owners find the one thing that makes them different in a crowded industry. Your job is to interview me, analyze my competition in real depth, and then build me a thorough, branded report that shows me exactly where my competitors stand and the unique angle that already exists inside my business.

Work through this in five phases. Do not skip ahead, and do not dump everything at once. Move through one phase at a time and wait for my answers before you continue.

PHASE 1: Get to know my business Ask me these a few at a time, then wait for my replies:

1. What do you do, in one plain sentence?

2. Who do you help, and what do they hire you for?

3. What is your main offer or product, and roughly what does it cost?

4. Where do you show up online? Share your website, Instagram, or LinkedIn links or handles if you have them.

5. How long have you been doing this?

PHASE 2: Find my conviction Now ask me the following questions ONE AT A TIME. My first answer will probably be generic, so push me. Ask "why" or "can you get more specific" until I say something with a real edge. Do not move to the next question until my answer is specific and honest.

1. What frustrates you about your industry? When you see other people in your space talk about what they do online, what makes you roll your eyes because you know it is oversimplified, misleading, or flat out wrong?

2. What do you find yourself explaining over and over to clients or friends, even when it is a little contrarian? What is the opinion you cannot help but share?

3. What is the one thing you are afraid to say out loud about your industry, your customer, or your product/offer? The opinion you have softened or kept to yourself so you would not rock the boat or lose people. Do not let me off the hook here. This is usually where the real angle is hiding.

4. Who do you NOT want as a client, and why? Then tell me what belief about your work that reason reveals.

5. What do you actually do that others in your space skip? Answer without using the words premium, expert, experienced, professional, trusted, or passionate. Name a specific method, background, tool, or way of working. If you are stuck, tell me what clients say surprised them about working with you.

6. If you posted one thing that would make the wrong people unfollow you, what would it say? Then tell me who reads that same thing and thinks finally, someone said it.

PHASE 3: Analyze my competition in depth First ask me: "Do you know your top five competitors? If yes, list them with links or handles. If not, I will identify them for you." If I give you competitors, research each one. If I do not, use everything you have learned about my business to identify five real competitors in my space. If you have web browsing or search available, use it to study their websites and social profiles so your analysis is based on real information. If you cannot browse, tell me clearly, ask me to paste their links or a few lines about each, and do not invent details you cannot verify.

For EACH competitor, build a thorough profile. Do not reduce a competitor to one line. Dig into their actual website and social presence and capture all of the following, with real specifics:

• Their brand and main promise. Their hero line or tagline, and the core promise they make to a visitor.

• Their target audience. Exactly who they are speaking to, as specifically as their presence reveals. Broad or narrow, and what kind of buyer.

• Their positioning. How they frame themselves in the market, and where they stand relative to the others. Are they premium or budget, safe or bold, generalist or specialist.

• What they stand for. The values, outcomes, and beliefs they sell.

• Their brand enemy. What, if anything, they position against. Do they name a real enemy, hint at one in a single line, or avoid it entirely and stay purely aspirational.

• Their voice and tone. How they sound, and whether a founder voice comes through.

• Their framework or signature idea, if they have a named method or point of view.

• Their pricing, if it is visible.

• Where they leave a gap that I could step into.

Once every competitor is profiled, step back and give me the big picture: the dominant story almost everyone in this space is telling, where each competitor sits relative to the others, and the one thing nobody in the field is willing to say.

PHASE 4: Build the substance of my report Work through each of these with me in plain conversation, then carry the FULL substance into the final report. Every item below must be thorough and specific in the report, written the way a real strategist would lay it out, not reduced to a single line. Push me to be specific, and if something I said earlier contradicts something else, point it out kindly so I can sharpen it.

1. Business snapshot. What I do and who I serve, in my words.

2. The headline finding. The single most important pattern from the competitive research and what it means for me.

3. The industry landscape. The dominant narrative everyone repeats, and the sea of sameness I am swimming in.

4. The competitor breakdown. A full profile of every competitor, covering all the dimensions from Phase 3: their brand and promise, their target audience, their positioning and where they stand, what they stand for, their brand enemy or lack of one, their voice, their framework, their pricing, and the gap they leave. Close with what they all have in common, said plainly.

5. The positioning matrix. Map every competitor and me across two axes, such as safe versus truth-telling and broad audience versus specific audience. Show where each one sits and name the open lane where nobody is competing.

6. The gap. What almost nobody in this space is saying or doing, stated clearly.

7. My brand enemy. The belief or behavior I am against, in one sharp sentence, with a short explanation of why it is the right enemy for me.

8. My unique angle. The specific thing I do that no one else in the set does, explained in enough depth to be convincing. This is the heart of the report, so give it real substance: what the angle is, why it matters to my audience, and what makes it defensible.

9. My point of view. The stance I keep repeating, written as something I could say out loud.

10. The thing I have been afraid to say, turned into a strength.

11. Who I serve, and who I do not, and the belief underneath that line.

12. My unique method. The specific way I work that others skip.

13. The post I am scared to make, plus a line naming who it repels and who it pulls in.

14. My positioning statement: "I help [type of person] who is sick of [the thing the industry sells] and is ready for [the thing I actually do]."

15. What I should borrow from the field. Smart mechanics my competitors use that I can adapt.

16. My first moves. Three or four concrete next steps grounded in the findings.

17. Three content ideas that lean all the way into this angle.

PHASE 5: Deliver my report Once we have worked through everything, deliver the final report with every section from Phase 4 fully written out. How you deliver it depends on what you can do:

• If you can show me a rendered visual document I can see without opening any code myself (a Claude artifact, or a canvas), build the branded report using the visual treatment below.

• If you cannot render that, do NOT paste raw HTML code at me. Give me the full report as clean, clearly formatted text with a bold heading for every section, so I still have everything.

The substance always comes first. The styling below is only about how it looks, and should never come at the expense of the depth above. Keep the design simple, clean, and editorial:

• Fonts: Playfair Display for headings, Poppins for body text.

• Colors: plum #805864 for headings and the cover, burnt orange #B8684A for accents, dividers, and callout borders, gradient black #2A2723 for body text, taupe #E8E3DE for thin dividers, stone white #F3EFEC for callout and box backgrounds, barely white #F9F7F6 for the page background. Never put orange text on a plum or purple background. On plum, use white text only.

• Open with a plum cover block: a small uppercase stone-white label reading "Brand Angle Report," a large Playfair Display title that is a short name for my brand or my angle with an italic subtitle, and my point of view as an italic white pull quote.

• Give every section its own plum heading with a thin taupe underline.

• Present each competitor as a clearly separated profile with a labeled line or small box for every dimension: brand and promise, target audience, positioning, what they stand for, brand enemy, voice, framework, pricing, and where they leave a gap. Put the main promise in a highlighted stone box, and pricing and voice in two small side-by-side boxes. End the section with a callout headed "What They All Share."

• Present the positioning matrix as a table with plum header cells, followed by a plum callout naming the open lane.

• Put my brand enemy, my unique angle, my scary post, and my positioning statement each in a standout callout box. Use plum with white text for the most important ones and stone-white with a burnt orange left border for the rest. Never orange text on plum.

• First moves as a numbered list. Content ideas as a two-column table with plum headers.

• Use single chevron bullets (the > character) in burnt orange for any other lists.

• Close with a simple centered footer: "K+C creative" in Playfair Display plum, and a small line reading "Built with The Brand Angle Finder at kandccreative.com."

• Generous whitespace. Editorial, warm, and clean, never crowded.

Start with Phase 1 now.

FROM OUR DESK

Go Find Your Angle

You deserve to know your market as well as the million-dollar brands know theirs. For a long time that took a strategy team you couldn't hire and a week you didn't have. Now it takes half an hour and a good prompt.

While we love giving away the good stuff but if you want to go deeper, we have the AI CLUB. It's $5.55 a month (less than a fancy Starbucks), and members get a bonus prompt, new AI tool or resource every month, the AI Brand Brain as a welcome gift, and member-only discounts on everything in our little AI shop.

And speaking of the shop, if this positioning work has you itching to finally get your blog going (a clear angle makes writing SO much easier, trust us), our Blog Writing Skill + Schema Markup Creator is the thing that helps you write posts real humans AND AI can actually find. Members get 30% off it, which pays for months of membership on its own.

And don’t forget to let us know what big Ah-Ha moments arise after you run this prompt!

We'll see you next Sunday.

XO Krissy (+ Claire)

Not a member yet? Join AI CLUB for $5.55/month and get the shop discounts, the monthly bonus, and the AI Brand Brain as your welcome gift.

Want blog posts that help AI recommend your business in AI responses? Grab the Blog Writing Skill + Schema Markup Creator. (AI CLUB members, your 30% code is in your welcome email.)