Competitive Intel Prompt: Extract Positioning, Pricing & Weak Spots
Turn competitor content into strategic intelligence — extract positioning claims, pricing signals, strategic assumptions, and vulnerabilities from any source.
What to Look For in Competitive Analysis
Most people read competitor content passively — skimming for interesting facts, noting features, maybe flagging a price point. But competitive analysis from article content requires active extraction. You’re not reading for entertainment. You’re reading to answer specific strategic questions.
The challenge is that competitors rarely state their strategy directly. They don’t announce “we’re positioning as the premium option” or “our weakness is enterprise scalability.” Instead, these insights hide in word choice, emphasis patterns, and what’s conspicuously absent.
Effective competitive intelligence extraction focuses on four dimensions: positioning (how they want to be perceived), pricing signals (what their monetization strategy reveals), strategic assumptions (what must be true for their approach to work), and vulnerabilities (where their armor has gaps).
The Prompt: How to Use It
The Competitive Intel Extractor (PR043) works with any competitor content — press releases, product pages, earnings call transcripts, industry reports, customer reviews, or news coverage. Each source type reveals different intelligence:
Press releases reveal positioning and strategic priorities. Look for how they describe themselves versus competitors.
Product pages expose feature emphasis and target customer profiles. What’s highlighted? What’s buried?
Earnings calls surface pricing pressure, market concerns, and strategic pivots that don’t appear in marketing materials.
Job postings reveal where they’re investing. Hiring for AI engineers? Enterprise sales? International expansion? Strategy follows hiring.
Customer reviews expose real-world weak spots that marketing hides.
After running the prompt, ask this follow-up: “Based on these findings, what’s one strategic move our company could make that exploits their weak spots while leveraging our strengths?” This forces the analysis into actionable recommendations.
Output Format: What You’ll Get
The prompt generates structured output across five dimensions:
1. Key Positioning Claim: AI identifies the competitor’s core value proposition — how they want the market to perceive them.
2. Pricing Signals: Even without explicit pricing, competitor content reveals monetization strategy through language about “enterprise,” “starter,” “custom pricing,” or “free forever.”
3. Strategic Assumptions: Every strategy rests on assumptions about the market, customers, or technology. AI surfaces what must be true for the competitor’s approach to work.
4. Potential Weak Spots: Vulnerabilities emerge from overreliance, missing capabilities, or strategic blind spots.
5. Questions for Further Research: Good competitive analysis generates more questions than answers. The prompt identifies what to investigate next.
If you’re analyzing multiple sources on the same competitor, run them separately first. The Research Brief prompt can then synthesize findings into a unified competitive profile.
For the complete work-reading toolkit, explore the Reading for Work pillar or return to the AI for Reading hub.
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Every competitor press release, every earnings call, every product page contains intelligence. The Competitive Intel Extractor helps you find it.
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