# Competitor Intelligence

## What It Is

The Competitor Intelligence skill gives your assignments a structured research methodology for building comprehensive reports on named retail competitors. It directs the assignment to gather, organize, and synthesize publicly available information — company overview, recent news, current promotions, assortment strategy, digital activity, and strategic signals — into a single working reference for Category Managers, Commercial, and Strategy teams.

This is a default skill — ready to use immediately without any setup.

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## What It Can Do

### Company Overview

Gather a factual baseline on each competitor: ownership, markets, store count, revenue signals, and core positioning — sourced from the competitor's website, company databases, and business press.

### Latest News and Announcements

Pull recent news across corporate developments, store openings and closings, financial results, executive changes, and regulatory events. Supports date-filtered searches so you can focus on a specific time window (default: last 90 days).

### Current Promotions

Identify active and recent promotional activity from the competitor's website, weekly flyers, and promotion aggregator sites — including promotion type, category, mechanic, and channel (in-store, online, app-exclusive).

### Assortment and Product Strategy

Examine the competitor's product range: new launches, private label expansion, category resets, and exclusive or first-to-market products.

### Digital and Marketing Activity

Assess the competitor's digital presence, including social media activity (public profiles only), e-commerce capabilities, app features, and notable marketing campaigns.

### Strategic Signals

Infer future direction from job posting patterns, leadership changes, and announced investments in new store formats, supply chain, or technology.

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## When to Use It

Use the Competitor Intelligence skill when your assignment needs to:

* **Prepare for category planning**: Understand competitor positioning before a range review or buyer meeting
* **React to a market move**: A competitor launched something new and you need context fast
* **Brief leadership**: Produce a structured overview of the competitive landscape for a strategy session
* **Support supplier negotiations**: Understand where a supplier's products are listed elsewhere
* **Plan promotions**: See what competitors are promoting and how before setting your own calendar

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## Example Tasks

* "Build a competitor intelligence report on Lidl Germany, focusing on their dairy category over the last 90 days"
* "What new products has Aldi launched in the UK this year? Include any private label activity"
* "Give me a side-by-side comparison of Tesco and Sainsbury's current promotional activity in snacks"
* "What strategic signals can you find from Rewe's recent job postings and executive hires?"

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## How to Use

1. Open the assignment you want to configure
2. In the assignment settings, find the Skills section
3. Select the Competitor Intelligence skill
4. In your assignment's SOP, describe which competitors to monitor, the relevant category or market, and any time window or priority areas
5. Connect the tools the skill needs: Firecrawl, Exa Search, Deep Research, Enterprise Browser, and optionally Google Sheets or Slack for output delivery

The skill's research workflow and report structure are applied automatically when the assignment runs.

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## Things to Know

* This is a default skill available to all teams
* The skill only accesses publicly available information — it does not log in to competitor systems or access private content
* Social media data is sourced only from public company and brand profiles
* Report confidence varies by competitor: well-documented national retailers produce richer output than regional or private companies with limited public presence
* Pairs with the Supplier Discovery skill (to find which suppliers a competitor stocks), the Should Cost Grocery skill (to analyze costs of competitor products), and the Input Cost Monitor skill (to track commodity costs in the competitor's categories)