Competitor Analysis With Little Effort: What Public Sources Reveal

Why small businesses rarely look at their competition systematically

In large corporations, there are departments that monitor competitors. In a small business, it is the owner, on the side, from memory. You know the names of the other providers in the region, have seen their vans, and hear from customers what they charge. That feels like knowledge. Whether it is accurate, hardly anyone checks.

That raises one question: what can be learned about competitors with little effort and exclusively from public sources, and how does that become a basis for decisions? To answer it, we first clarify the term and introduce Porter’s four corners model, then look at what research says about blind spots in competitor analysis, and finally set out a procedure for one afternoon.

The most dangerous competitor is the one you do not consider a competitor.

What competitor analysis is and what it is not

Zahra and Chaples (1993) define competitive analysis as the process by which a company delimits its industry, identifies its competitors, determines their strengths and weaknesses, and anticipates their moves. It comprises two parts: collecting information on competitors, known as competitive intelligence, and analyzing it for decisions. The authors stress that the analysis should be continuous because markets change constantly.

Competitor analysis is not spying, however. It relies on information that is publicly available or that customers share voluntarily. Nor is it a price list of the others. A competitor’s price is only meaningful if you know which service, which customers, and which strategy stand behind it.

The mental model: Porter’s four corners model

In his book on competitive strategy (1980), Michael Porter described a model for analyzing individual competitors that has become known as the four corners model. It assumes that a competitor’s behavior can be anticipated if you know four things about them. Two of them drive their actions, two describe what they do and can do.

The model’s value lies in the first two corners. Strategy and capabilities are visible from outside. Goals and assumptions have to be inferred. Yet these are what explain why a competitor responds to a price round with discounts or why they turn down an inquiry you would like to have. A business whose owner wants to hand over in three years behaves differently from one that has just opened a second location.

Blind spots: why experience does not protect against misjudgment

The obvious assumption is: if you have worked in an industry for a long time, you know your competition best. Clark (2011) tested this assumption in a longitudinal study of an emerging technology industry. He compared which competitors managers named with the actual competitive structure. Accurate assessment went along with better performance, but only when managers also knew the competition in detail. A second finding was surprising: accuracy fell with the manager’s industry experience. For the firm’s business experience, an inverted U-shaped relationship appeared: some experience helped, a lot of experience no longer did.

Ng, Westgren, and Sonka (2009) offer an explanation. They surveyed participants in an agricultural value chain and found that providers and customers by no means saw the same features and groups of competitors. The authors speak of a self-centered view of competition that arises from overconfidence and obscures what customers consider comparable. Li, Reis, and Khessina (2026) show, using movie theaters in Illinois during the spread of television between 1944 and 1962, that the most dangerous competition often comes from another industry when customers regard its offering as a substitute.

The studies concern technology industries, a value chain in livestock breeding, and movie theaters, very different fields. What they share is the finding that the provider’s view is systematically narrower than the customer’s. For a small business, it follows that your own assessment is a starting point, not an answer. Pellissier and Nenzhelele (2013) also found among small and mid-sized businesses in South Africa that owners’ work experience strongly influenced whether they engaged in competitive intelligence at all.

Which public sources are worthwhile

In most cases, public sources are enough for a reliable picture. The following overview assigns them to the four corners and shows how much effort they require.

The last row is the most valuable and the least used. Customers who decided against you know exactly what tipped the balance. How to conduct and evaluate such conversations is described in the guide analyzing lost deals. If you are examining a competitor as a possible partner or acquisition candidate, the guide due diligence on business partners contains further checks.

Competitor analysis in one afternoon

To get started, one afternoon per quarter is enough. The following procedure deliberately starts with customers rather than competitors, to avoid the blind spot identified in research.

1. Collect customers’ alternatives

   Go through the lost quotes of the last twelve months and note what the customer chose instead: a competitor, their own solution, postponing, or nothing at all.

2. Select the three most important alternatives

   Choose the three alternatives that occurred most often or cost the most revenue. A competitor who never wins against you is secondary for the analysis.

3. Fill in the four corners

   For each alternative, gather what public sources reveal about goals, assumptions, strategy, and capabilities. Distinguish what is proven from what is assumed.

4. Derive the differences

   Where are you demonstrably better, where worse, where equal? Record only what you can prove.

5. Make a decision

   What do you change as a result: target group, offering, price, arguments in the quote? An analysis without a decision was just activity.

In the example, the second most important opponent is not a competitor but the customer’s decision to do nothing. That changes the task. Against competitor A, a clear difference helps. Against postponing, a quote that shows urgency and benefit better helps. How quotes should be structured is described in the guide quotes that win.

What to do with the analysis

Competitor analysis has three typical applications. It sharpens your own positioning, because a difference is always relative to the alternatives; how to capture this in one sentence is shown in the guide sharpen your positioning. It prepares price decisions, because it shows where the business has room. And it helps in choosing new markets, for example before an expansion as described in the guide expanding into a new region.

• The three most important alternatives for customers are named, including doing nothing.
• The four corners are filled in with sources for each alternative.
• What is proven and what is assumed are marked separately.
• At least one concrete decision follows from the analysis.
• A date next quarter for repeating it is set.

Limits of analysis with public sources

Public sources have a built-in bias: they show what competitors want to show. Websites highlight strengths, reviews come from the most satisfied and most dissatisfied customers, and annual accounts of small businesses often contain little information. The analysis therefore provides indications, not certainty. It follows that assumptions should be labeled as such and checked against customer conversations.

Two views can be weighed. One considers systematic competitor analysis superfluous for small businesses because they know their market anyway. The other considers it indispensable. The findings of Clark (2011) and Ng, Westgren, and Sonka (2009) argue against the first view, because experience in particular can narrow the assessment. Against excessive effort speaks the fact that an analysis is only worth as much as the decision that follows from it.

Conclusion: what public sources can do

What can be learned about competitors with little effort? Enough to know your customers’ three most important alternatives, to roughly assess their goals, assumptions, strategy, and capabilities, and to derive a decision from this. The most important source is not the competitor’s website but the customer who decided against you. Research adds an uncomfortable insight: if you have known your industry for a long time, you should be particularly critical of your own assessment of the competition.

1. This week: For the lost quotes of the last twelve months, note what the customer chose instead.
2. Next week: Fill in the four corners for the three most important alternatives using public sources.
3. In two weeks: Derive a concrete decision and schedule the repeat for next quarter.

If you see your competitors through your customers’ eyes, you usually find fewer opponents than feared and different ones than expected.