Why we ask for three competitors before we design anything

Before we open a design tool on any new branding or website project, we ask every client for three real competitors, with a specific note on what they genuinely like and dislike about each one. Some clients find this an odd first step, expecting us to ask about their own business first instead. We ask about competitors first because understanding what a brand needs to genuinely avoid looking like is often more clarifying than any amount of purely aspirational direction on its own.

A client describing their own brand in isolation tends to reach for broad, positive adjectives that could describe almost anyone in their entire industry. Looking at real, specific competitors together forces a much sharper, more concrete kind of thinking: not just what we want, but specifically what we want to be different from, and why that difference genuinely matters to the business.

Watching a client react to a real competitor's actual site surfaces genuine, specific opinions faster than abstract brand questions ever manage to on their own. "I hate how corporate this feels" or "I love how simple this navigation is" gives us immediately actionable, concrete direction, in a way that "we want to feel professional but approachable" simply never quite manages to on its own.

We push clients past a purely surface-level reaction too, asking specifically why a particular element works or doesn't work for them personally. That follow-up conversation usually surfaces the real underlying value or concern driving the initial reaction, which is exactly the kind of insight that makes for a genuinely strong, well-grounded creative brief.

Knowing that a client wants to feel more approachable than their most buttoned-up, corporate competitor is more useful direction than a standalone claim to be "approachable" in the abstract, because it gives us a real, concrete reference point to actively design against and specifically measure our own choices relative to.

This contrast-based positioning also helps a client differentiate meaningfully in a genuinely crowded market, since it starts from the specific, real competitive landscape rather than a generic, purely aspirational brand statement that could just as easily apply to nearly any other business in the same broad industry.

Patterns that repeat across all three chosen competitors tell us what's likely considered standard or expected within this specific industry, useful context for knowing where genuine differentiation is realistically possible versus where deviation would just look confusing or genuinely out of place to potential customers.

Gaps that appear across all three, things none of them are doing particularly well, often point directly toward a real opportunity for the client's own brand to stand out meaningfully, in a way that's grounded in something concrete and real rather than differentiation chosen purely for its own sake.

We translate the specific reactions from this competitor conversation directly into concrete creative direction: "warmer and more personal than Competitor A, more visually structured and organized than Competitor B, with the pricing transparency Competitor C does well but a stronger, more considered visual identity around it." This is dramatically more actionable than a standalone list of aspirational adjectives on their own.

Design decisions made against this kind of specific, contrast-based brief are easier to evaluate objectively later too: does this choice genuinely move us in the intended direction relative to these specific real references, or does it just feel appealing to us in the moment without any clear connection to the actual, agreed-upon direction.

Sometimes a client genuinely can't easily name direct competitors, either because the category itself is new or because they simply haven't looked closely at the broader landscape around them. In that case we do the research ourselves and bring back a set of relevant reference points for their honest reaction, rather than skipping this step entirely just because the initial ask didn't land smoothly on the first try.

This adapted version of the exercise works nearly as well as the original, because the real underlying value comes from the client's genuine, specific reaction to real, concrete examples, not from the client personally having identified those specific examples themselves in the first place.

This conversation typically takes less than an hour, and it consistently saves considerably more time later by preventing design directions built on vague, easily misinterpreted aspirational language that different people on the same team can and often do read very differently from one another without ever realizing it.

We treat it as a non-negotiable first step now, even under real deadline pressure, because the alternative, designing against abstract adjectives alone, consistently produces more revision rounds later than the hour spent on this specific exercise upfront ever costs us at the very start of a project.

Pull up three real competitors' homepages right now, side by side, and write one honest sentence about what you'd want your own brand to do differently from each specific one. If those three sentences come easily and feel genuinely specific, you likely already have clearer creative direction than a generic brand adjective list would ever give you on its own.

We recommend business owners try this even before their first call with any design agency, not just us specifically, because it's a genuinely useful way to arrive at that first conversation with real, concrete thinking already done, rather than starting entirely from scratch together in the room on the day of the actual call.

Aspirational brand language feels productive to write and pleasant to read, and it's genuinely hard to design against directly, because it rarely resolves the countless small, specific decisions that any real project actually requires along the way.

Real competitors, and a client's genuine, specific reactions to them, give us something concrete and immediately usable to design toward and to measure our own choices against throughout the entire project.

This is now one of the very first questions we ask on every single new branding or website engagement, because it consistently produces sharper, more defensible creative direction than starting from abstract aspiration alone ever has for us, project after project, client after client, year after year.