Oren Meets World: market research playbook: competitive analysis & brand strategy secrets

This is how to create a competitive analysis. Whether you're launching a new brand, whether you're working for an existing brand or have your own, you wanna understand the things that are going on and use the info you have to make decisions. This is how to critically look at that. This is one of the foundations of brand strategy, creative strategy, all comes from exercises like what I'm gonna break down. So this is how you do a competitive brand audit going into 25, and it starts on TikTok search. I'm gonna use on running as an example in a lot of this. But why do I say TikTok search? Well, if you've used Instagram search, Instagram search is inherently useless. Google search is full of SEO optimized, basically uselessness. TikTok search is designed to give you the most relevant stuff for what you're looking for. And it's often a mix of influencers and just real customers who make content. And it is excellent at doing because you're gonna see actual reviews and you can search review, you can search complaint. It's pretty easy to see who's an influencer or not by their followers. But cool, my honest thoughts. She's got 50K, so lightly influential, but not too influential. You can see if it has a sponsored tag or not. But you can start going through, and sometimes it takes a minute to go through like dozens and dozens. You can go through everything from these 2.1 million view videos to 100K to 5K. You can find anything that you want on here for reviews for specific items. You can look at complaints. And you can hear what actual people are saying about a product and describing it directly and see the feedback for it. And I cannot represent how useful this is. So if you're a brand and you haven't done this yourself, very useful process to go through to see what people actually think of your products. Second, for competitors, why I like searching complaints and reviews is anything they call out that is bad. So for instance, if they're like, hey, this has this allergy effect or the ashiness can overpower the pigment, whatever it is, that is now a development point for your company. If it's a big enough problem, enough people talk about, you can focus your products on solving. And this is huge in any niche where you're trying to build something. You can also see the marketing. You can think about which of these is seeded, which of these is real, what are these videos are viral and why? And then begin to make a strategy from that. So the other thing I like to do with this is you can make briefs from it. So you can see, wow, there's viral videos about on running. Like there's not a lot of viral stuff in this top search, but you start to find outside results. Like, okay, this is someone who has 60K, but he made a video that has hundreds of thousands. And you know, okay, judging by the engagement, this isn't a paid post necessarily. And it's like, all right, what about this video is good? And what would I wanna do to potentially brief it so we could try something like that with our influencers, our creators, or for an ad? What is speaking to people here? And you can begin to populate that content into your content strategy. But TikTok is ahead of the game always. The trends that come from here come to Instagram later. They come to ads later. And it's worth being the starting point of any competitive research. Then we have Social Blade. Social Blade is excellent. You just need to create an account. It's free. But you can go to Instagram and look at what is actually happening. So the way I look at this, and I use this whole time for creator stuff too, is you'll see this chart. It shows you how many followers are growing a day. And it kind of ebbs and flows. So the last 30 days, 79,000. They're growing about 2000 followers a day. And some days are bigger than others, right? But you'll start to get a baseline of how good they're doing or not. And you get this chart. And you say, okay, my God, they grew. You know, they were growing relatively steadily. 20,000, 40,000 followers. They started to go up and up. Massive spike. What could have possibly led to that massive spike? And you can go over to the on Instagram. And you say, okay, what happened around and about those dates? And I will cut to the chase of what happened around those dates, but massive collaboration with one of the biggest celebrities in the world. And you can start to be like, okay, well, I'm quantifying what does a big celebrity partnership look like? Yeah, well, it looks like a 100K week, 165K week, and another 100K week. And then we're still going. Maybe that's worth it for them, right? As one can imagine. But it's great for brands to go back and pinpoint strategies. Look at what wheels took them there and why. All right, so I'm gonna take a quick break to talk to you about the Artlist 2025 content trend report. So they put out this free report. I linked it down here below. You can go grab it. To talk about all these trends, it's like super extensive. And I'm gonna call out a few of the ones I think are particularly important for you to understand. So creativity's emotional comeback and this idea of human connection. So we are seeing like a bunch of like shady AI content, for lack of a better term. Basically, people are throwing out a bunch of video that's mediocre. They're using AI to write scripts that are bad. There's just a lot of drivel that's out there in the content. But the stuff that's standing out is this like emotional-driven content. It's things that feel and give access to the human experience. We've seen this with content like Maximize, where people are basically making short films that make you feel something incredible. And the second one I wanna talk about is influencer collectives and creator collectives. This is something, obviously, you've seen me working on with the Brand Brothers, with Ashwin and Jordan and I, and then also the fact that I sell Cut30 with Colin Landforce and Alex Garcia. These are people that I do business with and work with. And this is how a lot of creators are gonna function going into next year. I think almost have to because there's tons of influencers and people rising fast that can do the same brand deal as someone else. But if you have a group where you can work together to understand trend and offer bigger things to bigger brands and make newer and exciting content and build like a narrative and a world around all of you acting together, this is how influencers and creators need to be thinking. And this applies to brands too. How can you be doing this collaboratively with all your creators to tell a story bigger than yourself? And the last trend I wanna talk about that's super interesting is around age inclusivity. A lot of us who are working on content for so long on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, talking to younger people, everything's nuanced, it has all this internet nomenclature and you're making things for people of a younger demographic. But that is not the case of who's actually on these platforms and consuming especially short form video and is now completely wide range. So A, mass appeal comes from really inclusive content, content that anyone can understand. Second, there's a room to zone in on those older demographics and be like, hey, we make content for people in their 50s and 60s in our specific niche. So anyway, this entire report with just tons of information, all the things you see here, about 60 pages of great stuff. I only called out three of multiple of the things they call out is available at the description of this video and you please grab that from Artlist. I think you will find a lot of interesting information. Then we have the ads transparency tools. If you haven't used this, this is just a massively useful free thing Facebook has. You go to any Facebook page and I know we don't spend a lot of time on Facebook is the only thing I use Facebook for besides my ads account. Click to About, click Page Transparency and you click See All, scroll down, go to Ad Library. This will show you for any brand that is running ads on Meta, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, what ads are running and how active they are. There's filters. This is my filter set to active. You can literally see the creative that they're on, reels they have, et cetera. And so an interesting one of this, like an interesting one, like I use to bring up a lot in conversation is called Buxton because they run a majority of their organic posts as ads as well, which is something I do on my page, on my brand page, on my personal page. You can start to see, oh, like there's some brands have a strategy of just running a ton of ads. There's some that run some ads and they run some of their reels. There's some that do both and you can begin to look at like how many creatives are they running? And amount of creative is interesting. They're running 34 ads right now. That's not that many ads. And you can then go back to the oldest one. All right, this has been running since October. They don't have a bunch of like, these are all relatively newer ads. I mean, they don't have any kind of long-term high performers. But then let's pop over to represent for instance, 500 results. So this is more typical. Any brand that's kind of growing and in that like million, million plus a month range is probably running 500 to a thousand plus ads. It's a shitload of creative, but like a lot of the brands that are really doing it are running that many ads. And you'll see tons of reels. They have tons of stuff. And if you scroll back, they have old winners in their ad accounts. They're still popular, right? You can see they're still running stuff from September that's working for them. But you can basically go through all of these, click the creative, see what they're doing and get creative ideas for your brand. If you're in the same, I'm not gonna wait for that to load. You can say, oh man, some of these are running since August. And yeah, and stuff that's running way back, way back is probably stuff that has worked for them. And so it was worth working on. And you can also see, oh cool. They're running a bunch of ads in German and you begin to understand people's strategy. And so I use this a lot just for creative ideas. What are people running as an ad? Like you may think if you don't have it, like you're not discerning on what's happening. I'd be like, hey, those two brands I just looked at are relatively the same size, somewhat? No. Represent is on a tear and in a significantly bigger category. Similar toolkit. This one you have to pay for the good access, but free access has some of it is Mill. We'll just keep on our represent angle here. Brand I respect for. Represent Club. Mill will let you look at any emails that people are sending out. So if you're doing competitive for emails, first thing you do is sign up for the list. So you can see what automation they give you. Are they sending you automated emails after you sign up? Onboarding email, additional sales, additional info. You'll learn a lot from that. Add items to your cart and see what their abandoned cart flow is. Is it one email? Is it multiple emails? What level of discount are they putting out there? If you tally all this stuff up, say you just took all this stuff and you have a boss or you're starting a new company, you're trying to get investment. You're like, hey, I did competitive analysis. And I went through and I found, here's the 10 pain points people are talking about on TikTok about our brand and about the, you know, and for our product, I think we should do. Okay, and then here's the social content strategy that's really worked for these brands. Here's our two peak points where they gained this many followers. And here's the content that helped jumpstart that. Okay, and now here's their top performing ads they've been running the longest. Here's four creative ideas I think that I want to do based on a successful creative other people in our niche are doing. Okay, then here's the exact email cart abandon strategy. They're doing 20%. I think if we did 30%, it would go even better. And hey, no one's, they're not using email automation, but we really should use email automation. And then start looking at the campaign. You start putting the info together. You're knocking the socks off anyone that, you know, they're people who are not used to people working that hard or having that much info. And then you become the person with all the context, right? I have all this context because I'm doing this constantly. Whenever I go do a, like, I have three brand workshops coming up of some variety. I'm going to go research this beforehand, right? I got one for like a major handbag brand, where I'm like, I'm going to go find out everything they're doing, everything's in their niche. And I'm going to come fully prepared with that. And I also, that's just a toolkit I have to talk about stuff in my videos, to be intelligent in other conversations by diving in on stuff like, for instance, here's all these represent emails. And you can access it at 12 months. If you, you know, you create an account, obviously I'm just browsing through this here, but like, okay, I have a thousand emails that are in milk. So how frequently and how often they're emailing. And you can actually go in and click it and see anything that's happened. And then by far the most useful, and this is paid. I've done a bunch of sponsored short form content for these guys. This is not a sponsored video at all. I use this app all the time, but this is part. If you, and having particle data is an absolute superpower. I cannot describe to you what life was like before this. Like, if you want to go look at exactly how much your competition is selling of something, then you can basically just go look at it. You can go look at Alloyoga and be like, this is $247 million sales over time. We can see there's this spike 1028, 2024, this huge, huge amounts of money. And guess what? That coincides with their early ******* Black Friday. How much money they're doing on 42,000 units of this accolade net pullover in espresso. Like their top selling product is brown. I can tell you a lot just there. So anyway, inside this, look at product distribution. They have similar stuff to the milled stuff in here, where you can actually, I think actually is milled inside of this, where you can go look at all the email campaigns. You can see discounts. Another one I like to pull up. I use a lot when I talk about discounting is Crafted. Crafted is really interesting one to look at. Look at this, Crafted's top products. Interesting for a couple of reasons. First is all their products are bundles. Their top products are all bundles, which is something that you should be 100% trying for any brand that's selling stuff, especially if you're selling jewelry or commodity stuff is like make your own set, make your own set, silver set, gold set, prebuilt set, prebuilt set, prebuilt set, average discount. These are always selling at an average discount of 20%. So there's a price perception thing they're doing constantly where they're like, hey, you can get a deal on this. They're pushing deals, whether that's coupon codes, that's live, they're running sales all the time. And you can see that's a strategy. Like the two core takeaways from this, if I was going to sell men's jewelry, I'd be like, I need to be doing sets. I need to be offering discounts like extremely regularly. They don't have to be huge. They can average out whether that's a bunch of 25 and 30% that I offset with a lot of always regular pricing, or it's like a constant 20%. That's the kind of info that you can pull around this. And you can also break down stuff like color. Basically it's like, okay, silver and gold are basically at a one-to-one ratio for these guys, which is super interesting, right? Like you may think that one might be bigger than the other. And that same thing for colors of different products that you may want to sell. So for instance, we look at represent here. You can see the best-selling products, higher price product. I can go down to color and be like, yeah, guess what? There is not a lot of color variance here. If I was selling to their demographic, maybe I do some brown and blue, but we are running black for the vast majority of it. And you can look at the male-female unisex breakdown. You can understand all this about any brand. So this is like the real tool where you can get an understanding of social media. You can get understanding of customer complaints. You can see what ads people are running inside the other tools, get some context. You can go here and see what the results are and compare it directly. Like in fact, I can go compare Lululemon and Aloe and realize what the difference is in their sales strategy is like always a really interesting thing to think about. And you can begin to understand just how in-depth these things run. Rate of things sold. I also like to look at this, look at viral products. This is the last one I'll probably do here. So I wanna look at Brooklyn and they're selling like viral linen products. You can start to be like, all right, what is the actual details of these sales? Like this is per day, how many units they're selling? Like thousands and thousands and thousands of units. Where's their revenue trending? Compared to their competitors, where's their revenue trending? Compared to the overall market, where do things like? All right, they're selling a hundred and you know, you can basically go analyze by fastest selling products. Like, okay, this tote bag is actually their best-selling product. Would I have guessed that? And I'll say, I thought they were more of a betting company. And you start to be like, look at the rates they have per day, how that the revenue of some of these products differs from the rates sold. And again, I would say this data is like, nothing's ever gonna be perfect. Let's say it's directionally correct. Let's say it's 90%, probably better. Maybe it's, maybe it's 85. You at least get the idea of like, what is the sale? But it gives you an idea of all the things you can do to run one of these competitive analyses, to understand the things that are happening. So your homework, I'm trying to add this into as many videos and email stuff as I can, is go do something like this for one of your brands. If you have a budget, you wanna do things, like go purchase something, go look at your whole demographic, inside milled, inside particle, and like begin to figure that out. If you're just looking at it to get your own awareness up, almost all the things I showed, again, you can do a lot milled without having to have the account, I think free account, you can look up to 12 months. Almost all the things that I put out here are free to go look at. And you can begin to get an understanding of what's happening around you. And this is like a super crucial tool to think about, because it's like the foundation of Brandstripe, is understanding the landscape around you. And in fact, that today we had the opportunity to get so data driven on that, in a way that just was not possible for decades, is amazing. So, I know it was a very technical, tactical video, like getting into stuff, but this is a crucial part of your strategy toolkit, and I really hope you enjoyed it.