Conversion · For Retailers & Brands

Competitor Defence

Hear the rival the moment your customer names them.

What is competitor defence?

Competitor defence is the measurement of how often customers name a rival brand or model during in-store sales conversations, what they say about it, and how often the advisor's answer keeps the conversation alive, captured from consented conversations rather than from surveys or price tracking.

Also searched as: competitor intelligence retail, competitive objection handling, rival mentions at point of sale. Part of the Market & Competitor Intelligence use case.

The most important sentence in retail is “the shop next door is offering...”. It is said thousands of times a week on your floor and recorded nowhere. Competitor Defence turns it into the earliest signal you have: which rival, against which model, with what argument, and whether your advisor held the customer or let them go.

The blind spot

Competitor intelligence arrives late and second-hand. A distributor's rumour. A sell-through dip. A mystery shopper sent to the rival's store. By the time it reaches a pricing review, the rival's campaign has been running on your floor for six weeks, in your customers' mouths, and every advisor has been answering it differently.

You trained a rebuttal for each of the top three comparisons. Whether anyone uses it, and whether it works, is unknown. What you can see is a conversion number that moved after the fact, with no way to tell whether the cause was the rival's offer or your floor's answer to it.

What changes

Every competitor mention on your floor becomes a data point the week it happens, not the quarter.
You see the argument, not just the name. Price, feature, finance, exchange, delivery. The rival's playbook, reconstructed from your own conversations.
Your advisors' answers become comparable. Who defends, who concedes, who loses the thread.
The rebuttal that holds customers is found on your own floor, in your own advisor's words, and becomes everyone's.

What you will know

How often each rival is named, by store and by week, before it shows up anywhere else.
Which of your models the comparison lands on, and the price point that triggers it.
Which advisor holds the customer against that rival, and what they say.
Whether a new rival campaign is working against you, days after it starts.

On the floor

A jewellery chain notices a rival's making-charge offer appearing in one conversation in four at two mall stores, up from one in ten a month before. Most advisors respond by matching the discount. One does not. Priya, at the flagship, answers with the exchange-value guarantee and keeps the customer far more often. Her answer becomes the network's within a week. The category team takes the mention curve into the pricing review as evidence, not anecdote.

Questions this answers

How often does your biggest competitor come up on your floor, and what does your advisor say back?
Do you have a trained answer to the top three competitor objections, and is it being used?

Frequently asked questions

Does it know the dealer across the road, or only the national brands?

Both. You tell Borentis who you compete with, down to the local store, and it tells you when new names start appearing that you did not list.

Can it tell whether a rebuttal actually worked?

Yes. Where the customer shared a number, the conversation stays connected to what happened next. Rebuttals are ranked by outcome, not by how confident they sounded.

We are a brand in multi-brand retail. Does this apply to us?

Especially. Your promoter is the only voice you have in a store you do not own, and the rival's promoter is standing three metres away. Brand Voice-of-Customer is built for that floor.