Analyze competitor approaches to winning over your customers

Welcome to this edition of Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Today, we're focusing on answer engines and how these tools simplify competitive intelligence.

Your mission? Try the prompt, experiment with variations, and adapt it to your work. Before you know it, you’ll be innovating with AI in your daily life—one playful experiment at a time.

This week’s playground: Analyzing competitor marketing strategies

Why this matters

Understanding how your competitors position their products can give you a significant edge. Answer engines like Perplexity, Gemini Deep Research, and ChatGPT’s deep research capabilities can quickly analyze vast amounts of content across the internet to reveal the strategies behind successful products.

Use case spotlight: AI for competitive analysis

What’s happening?

Companies are increasingly opting for answer engines over traditional chatbots for competitive analysis, and for good reason. These engines provide direct, factual responses to specific inquiries by tapping into extensive knowledge bases and scouring hundreds of websites and resources online. They excel at rapidly processing large volumes of information, identifying key trends, and uncovering insights across various domains and industries. Unlike chatbots, which excel at mimicking human-like conversations and can help navigate through information interactively, answer engines focus on delivering the right information quickly.

Example in the real world

Teams across industries are using answer engines to:

• Conduct comprehensive market research, competitor analysis, and explore new market segments.

• Gather balanced perspectives on critical issues, aiding in navigating regulatory changes and global market shifts.

• Analyze market trends, simulate investment scenarios, and assess risks and opportunities more effectively.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Copy and paste this prompt into Perplexity, Gemini Deep Research, ChatGPT’s Deep research, or your favorite answer engine tool. Note: Claude is not a good option for this given it does not have access to real-time information.

📝 Prompt: "Research how [Company A] and [Company B] promote their products to [Target Market] through blog posts, press releases, or webinars over the past six months. Focus on content that emphasizes unique selling points, benefits, and alignment with customer needs. Look for relevant case studies or testimonials. Summarize the findings in bullet points, detailing key messages, benefits for [Target Market], and any specific calls-to-action."

💡 Pro tip: Want to refine the output? Try these adjustments:

• Change the target market to see what changes.

• Compare this research to how you are prompting your products.

• Identify the keywords your competitors are targeting.

If using paid accounts of ChatGPT or Perplexity, consider rerunning the prompt using the "Deep Research" feature.

What did you discover?

Were there standout strategies or messages that seemed particularly effective? How can these insights inform your marketing efforts? Share your thoughts on the impact you see of using answer engines for competitive intelligence.

See you next week for another AI experiment.