At its core, a competitive set in market research is the group of brands, products, or service providers used for comparison within a study. This set could represent direct competitors (brands offering nearly identical solutions) or indirect competitors (those targeting the same consumer need in different ways).

Competitive sets help businesses understand how they’re perceived within the larger landscape and how they stack up across attributes like pricing, brand perception, usage, loyalty, and more. Whether you're building a brand tracking study, launching concept testing, or segmenting an audience, defining the right set of competitors is key to surfacing insights that inform strategy.

Types of Brands Typically Included

• Primary competitors: Brands selling similar products/services to your core offering
• Secondary competitors: Brands with overlapping audiences, but different product features
• Emerging brands: Up-and-coming players influencing your market segment
• Private labels or generics: In CPG categories, these often shape price-value perceptions

Why Category Context Matters

In research design, what's considered a 'competitor' isn't only defined by the business, but by how consumers think. That's where category cues come in – brand names, imagery, language, or other signals that define a category in consumers’ minds. For example, think of the coffee category. Some may associate it with Starbucks or Dunkin’ as category leaders, while others might see convenience store brands like 7-Eleven playing a strong role. Knowing what cues make sense to include can greatly shape the results of your study.

The truth is, your competitive set serves as the lens through which all your consumer insights come into focus. A narrow or unbalanced selection can bias results, mislead stakeholders, or obscure key learnings. With so many brands flooding each market – especially in fast-growth categories – it's vital to define the set clearly and strategically during research planning.

How It's Used Across Studies

Competitive sets are commonly used in:

• Brand tracking: Monitoring changes in awareness, trial, or loyalty over time
• Perception studies: Understanding how consumers rate different brands on various attributes
• Concept testing: Seeing how a new idea stacks up against existing options
• Market segmentation: Uncovering consumer needs, occasions, or preferences by brand usage

For teams using platforms like Dynata for DIY market research, choosing the right mix of competitor brands isn’t just a preliminary step – it’s the foundation of meaningful insights. And that’s where experience makes a difference.

In DIY market research, including tools like Dynata studies, getting to results faster is the goal. But speed alone isn’t enough – the real value comes when those results reflect reality and fuel the right business decisions. That’s where designing a balanced competitive set becomes critically important.

Balanced means more than just including a few well-known competitor brands. It means reflecting the full spectrum of how consumers experience the category. If your study is too narrow, you risk missing key players that influence consumers’ views. If it’s overly broad, you might dilute your insights and confuse your audience.

Common Pitfalls in DIY Research Design

When teams rely heavily on DIY tools without expert support, they can run into several challenges when crafting competitive sets:

• Over-representing market leaders while ignoring challenger brands or private labels
• Relying on internal brand assumptions rather than real customer perceptions
• Missing crucial category cues that shape consumer choice (language, formats, pricing tiers)
• Introducing bias by omitting relevant product types or emerging players

These missteps can lead to flawed comparisons, undermine brand equity tracking, and make it tough to identify growth opportunities. Even though your survey tool may be powerful on the execution side, it won’t correct for shaky research setup – and that’s where experience counts.

How Experienced Researchers Add Value

Experts – like the On Demand Talent professionals from SIVO – bring a strategic mindset to DIY research tools. They consider audience perception, category trends, and segmentation frameworks to make sure your study design mirrors the real choices consumers face. From there, your data can actually help you understand how and why people choose certain brands within the context of their needs.

Here’s how they typically approach designing balanced sets:

• Review your category and product landscape through a consumer lens
• Assess retail, eCommerce, or usage patterns to find missing players
• Incorporate category cues that structure the field realistically
• Build in direct, indirect, and fringe competitors for contrast

Real-World Fit: More Clarity, Less Assumption

A balanced approach is also more inclusive of how fragmented and complex many markets have become. In brand comparison studies for wellness products, for example, the competitive set may need to span from pharmacy chains to boutique DTC brands – each influencing consumer behavior differently. Getting that mix right ensures your insights truly reflect the full picture.

Ultimately, the combination of DIY speed with strategic planning powers stronger decision-making. And by pairing modern tools with embedded expertise, companies can avoid bias, fill knowledge gaps, and build a repeatable playbook for future research. That’s exactly what On Demand Talent from SIVO is built to do: plug in experienced insights professionals who can elevate your research quality while supporting your team in making the most of the platforms you already invest in.

Choosing the right mix of competitor brands and category cues is the foundation of a balanced competitive set. Whether you're running brand tracking studies, market segmentation, or a DIY market research survey through a platform like Dynata, your results are only as good as the inputs you select. A well-rounded competitive set ensures you’re capturing realistic and relevant consumer insights that reflect the true market landscape.

Start with Your Brand's Competitive Context

Begin by analyzing your direct and indirect competition. Direct competitors are brands offering similar products or services, targeting the same audience. Indirect competitors may meet similar customer needs in different ways. Including both helps you uncover how consumers perceive your brand in the broader market.

For example, if you're a sparkling water brand launching a survey, your set may include major sparkling water brands, premium bottled water options, and even flavored soda alternatives. This gives you a full picture of how consumers view hydration and refreshment choices.

Include Recognizable Category Cues

Category cues act as visual or verbal signals that help respondents quickly understand the product category – even if they're not interacting with the full brand environment. Examples of category cues in brand studies can include pack images, descriptors like “zero sugar,” flavor names, or packaging shapes.

These cues play a vital role in DIY tools like Dynata, where clarity matters. Including the right category cues ensures that even without physical product interaction, survey participants make fair and informed mental comparisons.

Balance Familiarity with Realism

While you want to focus on the brands most relevant to your category, think beyond market share alone. Sometimes, small but emerging competitors can reveal shifting trends in consumer preferences. A mix of well-known leaders and rising challengers helps you build a more accurate map of the market.

Tips for Choosing a Balanced Set:

• Include brands across different price tiers – economy, mainstream, premium
• Cover a range of feature sets – basic options to high-innovation products
• Reflect brand tone differences – traditional vs. lifestyle-forward vs. niche

Choosing the right mix is both an art and a science. You want enough variety to uncover insights, but not so many that data gets diluted. This is where experienced consumer insights professionals can bring tremendous value by guiding competitive set design.

Even the most well-intentioned research can fall short if the competitive set isn’t designed with care. Many beginner teams using DIY market research tools like Dynata fall into common traps that distort results and lead to inaccurate decisions. Fortunately, understanding these issues can help you make smarter choices upfront.

1. Picking Only Closest Competitors

While it’s tempting to only include your direct competition, this can create a narrow view. A brand might perform well in a set of near-identical brands, but that doesn’t reflect the broader market context where consumers may be choosing between different categories entirely. Broaden your scope to avoid over-favoring your brand.

2. Choosing Too Many or Too Few Brands

More brands do not always equal better insights. Including too many options can fatigue survey participants, leading to low-quality responses. On the other hand, too few brands may limit your understanding or skew results. Aim for a balanced number that reflects variety without overwhelming users – often between 5 to 10 options, depending on the survey type.

3. Using Unfamiliar Brands

Inserting little-known local or niche brands can confuse participants, especially if there’s insufficient category context or cues. This is particularly risky in online studies where consumers don’t have product experiences to rely on. If using lesser-known brands, balance them with more recognizable names and provide clarifying cues like imagery or descriptions.

4. Skipping Category Cues

Leaving out category cues is one of the most overlooked mistakes in DIY surveys. Without clear markers like packaging visuals or product type descriptors, participants may rely on flawed assumptions, skewing data. Cues help ground the study in the real-world decision-making consumers go through.

5. Assuming Tools Will Do the Thinking

DIY platforms are fast and powerful, but they need thoughtful setup. Skipping the strategic work of brand comparisons or relying only on templates often results in flat or biased findings. Tools like Dynata are only as effective as the research planning behind them.

Key Takeaway:

Good research starts with good design. Avoiding these mistakes ensures your competitive set stays aligned with your brand objectives, giving you more accurate, actionable consumer insights for market research, brand tracking, and segmentation studies.

As DIY research tools grow in popularity, many teams are discovering that speed and scale come with a tradeoff – navigating sophisticated study design without the right expertise. This is where SIVO’s On Demand Talent can add immediate value. Our network of experienced insights professionals helps teams get more from their tools by strengthening study design from the start.

Expertise That Bridges the Gap

On Demand Talent professionals aren’t freelancers or junior hires – they're seasoned insights experts who have built and led complex studies across industries. They understand how to select competitor brands that reflect real-world consumer decision-making, ensure category cues are relevant, and structure surveys that avoid bias.

Whether you're designing a brand tracking study or testing a new marketing concept, they’ll guide you through selecting a credible and balanced competitive set that ensures quality results.

Flexible, Right-Size Support

If your internal team lacks the time or depth to handle competitive set design for an upcoming study, you don’t have to compromise. SIVO’s On Demand Talent offers flexible support – whether you need a few days of guidance or a dedicated professional embedded for weeks at a time.

This agility makes it easy to:

• Close short-term skill gaps quickly
• Train teams to better use platforms like Dynata
• Remove bias from competitor brand selection
• Design more effective brand comparison and segmentation research

Uplevel Your DIY Investment

You’ve invested in survey tools and fast research platforms to stay agile – now pair that with the right expertise to ensure quality. On Demand Talent helps you make the most of your technology stack while protecting research integrity. It’s a practical way to build team capacity while growing long-term research planning skills.

For example, a fictional mid-sized snack brand used On Demand Talent to improve their Dynata study setup. With a better-designed competitive set, they discovered that their real challenge wasn’t other snacks – it was beverages. This insight reshaped their messaging entirely, giving them an advantage in a cluttered market.

From high-level guidance to hands-on support, On Demand Talent gives you immediate access to talent that elevates your consumer insights, delivering clarity and confidence in every study you run.