Do you know exactly where your brand is positioned in the market? Are you using all available data to learn what the competition is doing so you can avoid their mistakes, replicate their successes, and stay ahead of industry trends? In the Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty industries (FLB), competitive benchmarking is a crucial piece of the PR and marketing puzzle. It can be used internally and externally to give you hard data on how your brand is performing, so you can make better strategic decisions and maximize your marketing budget.
In this post, we’ll take you through what competitive benchmarking is, why it’s critical to your PR & marketing success, and how to do it. We’ll also look at some real-world examples. So, let’s jump in.
In this article you’ll learn…
What Is Competitive Benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking is:
“The process of using relevant metrics to measure where your brand stands against competitors and the market overall.”
This can give you powerful insights into things like:
- Industry trends and best practices
- What’s working for the competition
- Which brands are becoming threats to your position
- Who the key Voices are in your field
- …and more.
As well as benchmarking against external competitors, you can also use competitive benchmarking internally.
For example, an insights director at a multinational cosmetic company such as Estée Lauder, with a diverse portfolio of brands, might want to understand how each one performs within the broader company.
How did the recent Clinique campaign stack up against the MAC Cosmetics campaign launched at the beginning of the year? Were there any noticeable trends to be picked up on? Did influencers make a significant impact? Was the securing of print media coverage crucial to their success?
Extracting these internal performance insights will help directors to effectively inform their marketing & PR teams’ strategies, or advise leadership on a potential shift in overall business strategy—based on which brands are performing the best.
Now, you may be wondering: What’s the difference between competitive analysis and competitive benchmarking?
While the two things are similar and may even overlap, competitive benchmarking is more future-focused. It measures how your competitors perform over time so you can find trends in the data, identify best practices and gain visibility into audience behaviors.
A competitive analysis, meanwhile, is undertaken to:
“assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competition at a given point in time.”
This process is especially pertinent during the launch phase of a business. While both of these processes are important, competitive benchmarking allows you to track performance long-term using standardized KPIs.
Why Is Competitive Benchmarking Important?
While benchmarking against your own past performance can help you stay on the right trajectory, it leaves out a massive part of the picture. Benchmarking against the competition gives you a clear picture of where you’re positioned and helps you continually optimize your strategic direction.
But there’s a caveat.
For your competitive benchmarking strategy to work at its best, you need consistent metrics. If you’re patching together data from multiple tools and sources, comparing different competitors and time periods becomes difficult and unreliable. (Media Impact Value® MIV®) is an example of a consistent metric—we’ll talk more about that below.)
Once you have reliable data with consistent metrics, competitive benchmarking allows you to:
Spot Trends and Best Practices
If it’s working for the competition, there’s a good chance it will work for you. Using competitive benchmarking data, you can skip the costly trial and error and shortcut to what’s proven to be most effective. For example, if your competitors are having the highest campaign success working with Micro-Influencers, you can adjust your own influencer marketing strategy accordingly. In the same way, you can see what’s not working for the competition and avoid it.
Strategize
Competitive benchmarking is more than a snapshot of where you stand at any given moment. It provides long-term PR, marketing, and influencer data that can be translated into actionable tactics. It can help you identify opportunities, pinpoint your weaknesses, and determine goals and priorities.
Back Up Your Budget Decisions With Data
Your gut feelings may be right, but rallying executive support can be difficult without concrete reasoning. An effective competitive benchmarking strategy gives you the hard data you need to validate and back up your spending decisions.
Identify Voices
At Launchmetrics, we break down marketing and communication “Voices” into five large groups:
- Influencers
- Celebrities
- Owned Media
- Partners
- Media
Now, imagine if you could find out exactly which mix of Voices offers the maximum strategic effectiveness to your competitors: This would allow you to understand what tactics you are not using that could work for your brand, or what strategies you already have that put you at an advantage.
[If you want to know more about the Voices system to assess the value of your strategy, take a look at Understanding the Voices That Influence the Buying Process.]
Showcase Your Successes
Competitive benchmarking doesn’t just help your hard work pay off, but it also helps you to prove it. Benchmarking against the competition allows you to measure your impact and share the results with internal stakeholders.
In short, competitive benchmarking doesn’t just give you an edge over your competition; it’s mandatory for any brand that wants to stay relevant and gain market share in an increasingly competitive, social media-driven world.
How Do You Do a Competitive Benchmarking Analysis?
How you perform your competitive benchmarking will come down to what your goals are, what you want to measure, and what tools you use. To get you started, here are some key things to know, plus some real-world examples.
Choosing Which Competitors to Benchmark
Choosing which competitors to track and benchmark against is a crucial starting point. You need to choose the most relevant competitors in your industry, otherwise, your data will be thrown off.
There are three main types of competitors to consider:
Close Competitors
These are your most direct competition—i.e., brands of a similar size and success level. Keeping an eye on what they’re doing helps you stay on the right track and identify opportunities for improvement.
Upcoming Competitors
These are smaller brands that may not be a threat to you—yet. But having them on your radar is a good idea. When choosing which ones to track, ask: Which upcoming brands are innovators? Who is generating buzz and rapidly gaining traction in the market? These may have the potential to shake up the industry, and when they do, you’ll want to know about it.
Industry Leaders
The bigger brands achieved their success for a reason, so it’s worth looking up to gain insights into how you can do the same. Watching industry leaders will keep you abreast of trends and help you identify best practices.
While close competitors should be your main focus, the best competitive benchmarking strategy will incorporate competitors from all three groups.
Which Competitive Benchmarking Metrics Should Be Tracked?
The next big question is about benchmarking metrics. In a nutshell, you want to see where you rank within your industry and find out how your marketing mix is performing against the competitors.
The challenge is how to accurately measure performance in a multichannel environment, where customers flit regularly from physical stores to e-commerce to social shopping and back again, making impact difficult to measure. KPIs like share of voice (SOV), social growth, social reach, and engagement are OK—but none gives a complete picture.
The best solution is to use a concrete indicator, able to standardize the results of the various tactics implemented through the multiplicity of channels and actors.
Media Impact Value is one such metric—a numerical standard in the form of a monetary figure.
This dollar value allows you to easily understand and compare the ROI offered by a post, publication (online or in print), in-house media strategy or even an entire omnichannel campaign. This figure is calculated using an intelligent algorithm that includes both a quantitative and qualitative assessment.
Having this standardized metric makes it easy to compare your brand against your competitors over time. But on top of that, it also allows you to understand which Voices (as mentioned above, are having the most impact for you versus competitor brands, thus helping you to identify top performers and brand advocates and find the right spending balance.
Competitive Benchmarking Software Tools
One way to conduct your competitive benchmarking analysis is to manually search for and collate data on the competition. Some information is publicly available or calculable—for example, you can track a brand’s social growth or calculate SOV through your media monitoring activities—but other data is more difficult to gather. For example, how can you quantitatively assess the ROI a competitor is gaining from placements in print publications? Or easily calculate how much value a brand is reaping from, say, celebrities versus influencers?
The answer is actually simple: by leveraging technology.
In today’s tech-driven world, the right software tools already exist. They take the grunt work out of the competitive benchmarking process, leaving you free to focus your attention where it matters. A good software tool will not only mine the data for you but also collate and present it in a way that makes it easy to see, at a glance, how your brand is ranking in the industry and how your marketing efforts are working in comparison to your competitors.
You can also benefit from choosing a software tool that’s industry-specific.
Launchmetrics Insights benchmarks hundreds of brands across Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty. Using MIV as a standardized metric, the Insights dashboard shows the year-on-year evolution of your brand against others. Because MIV provides such a concrete KPI, our Insights tool can also calculate Share of Value (percentage of impact your brand represents compared to your competitors) and more.
If you’re looking to save time and effort in your competitive benchmarking, having the best tools is crucial.
Competitive Benchmarking Examples
To demonstrate competitive benchmarking in action, let's look at a couple of different examples.
Gen Z Marketing Report
The first competitive benchmarking example comes from our 2024 report, Reinventing Influence: The Gen Z Impact on Fashion Marketing. For this report, we wanted to understand the dynamic shifts driven by Generation Z and provide fashion and lifestyle brands with key insights into how to resonate with this crucial segment of the market.
Our competitive benchmark analysis using Launchmetrics Insights revealed the top 20 performing brands in the Luxury, Premium and Mass Market categories. Let’s take a look at which brands topped the Premium rankings:
As you can see, SKIMS soared to the top in 2023. It’s no surprise that the brand would do well thanks to the massive reach and influence of its founder, Kim Kardashian. But that alone doesn’t account for its success.
Digging deeper into the data, we find that the SKIMS brand intersects with two major Gen Z priorities: authenticity and comfort.
On the latter, our report revealed that comfort-first brands—like SKIMS, Ugg, The North Face and Birkenstock—saw an average of 197% growth in MIV since 2020. Most crucially, though, is SKIMS’ unwavering commitment to its brand values like inclusivity and body-positivity, as demonstrated through its messaging, sizing, and wide range of well-chosen celebrity ambassadors.
For example, Launchmetrics data shows that SKIMS’ collaboration with Lana del Rey garnered $13.7 million in MIV within just four days—with an Instagram post by del Rey alone earning $4 million. More recent campaigns have featured Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan and the US Olympic team.
How you specifically demonstrate authenticity depends on the values of your brand, but what SKIMS clearly shows us is that cultivating a distinct lifestyle and community that resonates with the values and the needs of Gen Z is key to success.
If you’d like to view the full Gen Z Marketing Report, click below.
Beauty Marketing Report
Another example of a competitive benchmark analysis is a report we recently put together from the beauty industry.
Using Launchmetrics Insights, we benchmarked the top 20 performing beauty brands in the first half of 2024:
This analysis provides a great overview of which brands dominated and how they performed relative to one another. However, to obtain maximum value from the benchmarking we have to dig deeper—for example, analyzing the movement of brands over time.
Pat McGrath Labs is a new entry into the top 20 global rankings, having made an impressive leap of six spots and increasing its MIV by +57% since the previous semester. But why? Were there any particular strategies or tactics that the brand used? What can we take away from this analysis to integrate into our own PR and marketing campaigns?
Looking at the data, we can see that Pat McGrath Labs leveraged the Media Voice 125% more than in the previous semester. Though Influencers still held the greatest Voice share, the increase in Media placements drove massive value for the brand.
Once again, we can dig further and ask how they did this. The answer? Through inserting themselves into the most relevant and buzz-worthy moments of the year, from the epic March cover of British Vogue to the Met Gala and Haute Couture shows.
By forging strategic partnerships that give the brand high visibility during these trending moments, Pat McGrath Labs was able to tap into and harness the powerful Media Voice to maximize their campaign results.
If you’d like to view the full Beauty Marketing Report, click below.
The Beauty Industry Trends of 2024: Data and Insights by Launchmetrics in partnership with CEW UK
Conclusion
The importance of competitive benchmarking should not be understated. After all, your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it exists relative to your competitors. You want to retain your audience plus attract the interest of new consumers who are less loyal to brands and base their choices on external recommendations. And to do that, you need to understand the competitive scenario you’re in and allocate your marketing budget accordingly.
As we’ve discussed above, to make the process as easy and effective as possible, the wisest move you can make is to leverage the right tools. Doing this makes it easy to track not just where your brand is positioned but why. So, you can learn from your competitors, replicate their most successful tactics, and ultimately, increase your position in the market.
How do you go about competitive benchmarking? And what could you do better?
By Gina GulbertiVICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING
Gina is passionate about storytelling, creativity, and digital strategies. As Vice President of Marketing, she leads a rockstars team from the sunny city of Madrid! Being a crazy savvy marketer, in 2020 Gina co-founded the global community of b2bmarketers.com and currently combines all this activity, teaching Inbound Marketing in different business schools.
