The comp set on the brief is almost always wrong — coffee, beauty, fast-casual, every time.
An agency wanted the one finding the incumbent walks in without. We read every competitive field from where consumer opinion co-occurs — and found the named comp set wrong in every category we checked. A national coffee chain's customers also-weigh a fast-food chain ahead of any coffee rival. A prestige-beauty brand's top also-weigh is a drugstore — above its obvious beauty competitor, with another drugstore at #3. Whatever category you pitch, the field the client named is rarely the field they're in. And once you have the real one, the cross-shop map says it's a delivery brief, not a positioning brief.
Benchmark it against the obvious rivals
The instinct is to build the pitch around the named competitive set — coffee vs coffee, beauty vs beauty. It's the field the category map assumes and the brief defaults to.
A fast-food chain. A drugstore. Two of three
Who their customers actually also-weigh: a national coffee chain's #1 cross-shop is a fast-food chain, with no national coffee rival in the set. A prestige-beauty brand's top two also-weighs are drugstores, not beauty banners. The field is wrong — and the set shifts city by city, so it has to be re-pulled per market before every pitch.
Name the field from where opinion co-occurs — the real rival set is wider than the brief assumes, and it travels to any category.