Competitive Strategy Consulting

Competitive strategy consulting decides where a company competes, who it is actually competing against, and on what terms the position can be held. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999. It sits inside our business strategy and transformation practice, which argues that durable value is created on the demand side rather than harvested on the supply side.

Competitive positioning is the part customers can see: the claim you make on a particular customer situation, and the reason a buyer in that situation should choose you over the alternatives they are genuinely weighing. The harder half is the structure underneath the claim, the part that makes the position expensive for a competitor to copy. Most engagements that call themselves competitive strategy only deliver the first half.

• Since 1999strategy and positioning work
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Hidden in Plain Sightthe Demand Landscape method, by our founder

When companies bring us in

Nobody asks for competitive strategy services in the abstract. The request arrives attached to a result that stopped making sense. These are the five situations we hear most often:

• Share is stable and growth is not. You are holding your place in the category and the category is quietly moving somewhere else.
• A competitor you do not recognize keeps appearing in win-loss. They are not in your benchmark set because they are not in your industry classification.
• Price is set by the competition rather than by preference. Every negotiation starts from a rival’s list price, which means customers see no difference worth paying for.
• An acquisition has made the question genuinely unclear. Two businesses now sit under one roof and nobody can state what the combined company competes on.
• The plan has stopped predicting outcomes. Forecasts miss in the same direction repeatedly, which usually means the analysis is measuring the wrong contest.

The people we work with are usually the CEO, the chief strategy officer or a divisional president. Finance belongs in the room early. A competitive position that cannot be traced to price, share, cost or capital efficiency is an argument the CFO will decline, correctly.

Why category-based competitive analysis does not work

The competitive set on a strategy deck is almost always drawn from the category, because that is how market data is sold and how industry reporting is structured. It lists the companies that make the same thing you make.

Customers do not shop by category. They shop by situation. In any given situation the real competitive set includes companies no producer would put on the same map: a different category entirely, a service that removes the need for the purchase, a habit, or the decision to do nothing at all. When the analysis excludes those, it cannot explain the result it is trying to explain. What it produces instead is benchmarking against companies losing the same customers you are losing, price positioning set against a rival the customer never considered, share gains inside a category that is shrinking, and differentiation claims aimed at a comparison nobody is making.

The second failure is subtler and more expensive. Most positioning work stops at the message. It settles what the company will say and leaves the operating structure untouched, which means any competitor willing to say the same thing can copy it within a quarter. Advantage that lives only in communication is rented. LEGO holds its position in markets that keep changing because of how the company competes, not because of a phrase. That is also the argument Dr. David Collis makes about bringing strategy back to life: a strategy is a system of choices, not a statement of intent.

Competitive position built into structure shows up in the only place that settles the argument. Our 2026 study Unrealized Value tracked the strongest global brands across twenty-four years of stock market data, from 2001 to 2024. As a portfolio they beat the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year, and a dollar invested became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. The companies that left that value on the table did not have weaker positions. They managed position as a communications output instead of a capital asset.

What our competitive strategy consulting services include

Six bodies of work. Most engagements use two or three, and the diagnostic decides which. Each one connects to a capability in this group, so the strategy and the thing that executes it are not bought from two different firms.

1. Define the field of play

Not the category, and not a market defined by supply. The field of play is the set of demand spaces where the contest for your customer is genuinely happening. We establish the real competitive set inside each space from customer behavior rather than industry classification, find where demand is moving so the position is set against where the contest will be, and name the spaces you are already competing in without having chosen to. This is demand landscape mapping, the method set out in Hidden in Plain Sight by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler.

2. Establish the right to win

The right to win is a permission test before it is a capability test. Companies routinely have the ability to enter a space and no credibility with the customer to do so. We test whether customers would accept you in that situation rather than assuming it, name the assets, data and relationships that make the advantage hard to copy, and write down the honest cases: spaces that are attractive and where you would arrive late with a budget. Permission is measured through brand equity, which is what customer permission looks like when you put a number on it.

3. Decide which assets compete for which spaces

Once the field of play is set, the portfolio has to answer to it. Which brands and products are aimed at which demand space, which ones are competing with each other rather than with the market, and which are funded out of habit. We treat this as capital allocation rather than as a chart: every asset earns its claim on investment or loses it. That is brand and product portfolio strategy.

4. Turn the position into price and route to market

A competitive position is proven at the point of sale or not at all. If it is real, it shows up as a preference premium customers will pay in the spaces you chose, which is the job of pricing strategy. The route that carries it, the channel economics, the coverage model and the terms, follows from the position rather than preceding it, which is what commercial strategy sets. Most companies run those two in the opposite order and then wonder why the premium never appears.

5. Build the advantage into the interaction

Product features are copied. Interactions are harder, because they involve the customer, the company and often a set of partners at the same time, and because the data they generate compounds with use. We decide which interactions carry the advantage with customer journey mapping, and where holding the end relationship yourself is the only way to own it, we build that with direct-to-consumer programs. Going direct is a competitive decision about who owns the customer relationship and the data, not a channel decision.

6. Change what the company can actually do

A position the operating model cannot deliver is a press release. Where the field of play requires capabilities the company does not have, the work extends into digital transformation, which changes what a company competes on rather than how fast it runs the model it already has, and into marketing transformation, where the go-to-market organization is the constraint. Where the question is whether a technology shift changes the contest itself, our generative AI strategy work tests which use cases defend a position and which only reduce cost, and insists on knowing the difference before the order is set.

How a competitive strategy engagement works

1. Diagnose the contest. Customer and occasion research, win-loss evidence, pricing and share data, and a review of the competitive set you currently track. The output is the gap between the competitors on your deck and the ones your customers are choosing between.
2. Choose the field of play. Demand spaces sized and ranked, permission tested with customers, and the right to win assessed space by space. The output is a decision with its exclusions written down, not a menu.
3. Design the defense. Where the advantage lives: in the interaction, in data that compounds, in partner relationships, in switching costs. Then the pricing, portfolio and commercial decisions that follow from it.
4. Connect it to the numbers. The chain from position to preference premium, to realized price and share, to economic profit. Plus the tracking that tells you next year whether the position is holding.

Settling a field of play and a defensible position usually takes about a quarter, longer where primary occasion research is needed or where the portfolio is large. How quickly it pays back depends less on the strategy than on how early pricing and finance are involved.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for competitive strategy

• We define the competitive set from demand, not from industry data. The Demand Landscape method finds the spaces where the contest is actually happening, including the competitors your category reports will never list.
• We insist the advantage name a mechanism. Data that compounds, a partner relationship, a switching cost, a network effect. Not an adjective.
• We measure position in the CFO’s currency. Preference premium, realized price, share and economic profit, so the strategy survives the next budget cycle.
• Strategy and the capabilities that execute it in one firm. Portfolio, pricing, commercial, journey and transformation work are done by the same people who set the position, so nothing is lost in the handoff.
• Independently recognized. WirtschaftsWoche has named Vivaldi a top consultancy for Strategy and Innovation in its Best of Consulting awards five times.

How to evaluate a competitive strategy consultant

Including us. We would put all five of these to every firm on the shortlist.

• Ask how they define the competitive set. If it comes from category data you will get a benchmarking exercise. The useful version is built from what customers actually chose between, which sometimes includes doing nothing.
• Ask whether the recommendation changes anything outside marketing. A position that requires no operating change is a position a competitor can copy at will.
• Ask what they will tell you not to compete for. Strategy that adds priorities without removing any is a plan for spreading investment thinner.
• Ask how the advantage is defended. The answer should name a mechanism rather than describe a quality.
• Ask how it connects to the financial numbers. If the position cannot be traced to price, share, cost or capital efficiency, the CFO will decline it and should.

Competitive strategy consultancy, competitive intelligence provider or large management consultancy?

The three get shortlisted together and do different jobs. The useful question is which decision you need made.

Related services

Competitive strategy is one of two groups inside our business strategy and transformation practice. The other is digital platforms and ecosystems strategy, which takes over when the question is no longer how your firm competes but who participates in the system around it and where the economic profit accrues. If your position depends on partners more than on products, start there. For the argument connecting strategic choices to growth outcomes, read the causal link your growth strategy is missing.

Competitive strategy services in the US and worldwide

Vivaldi is headquartered in New York and has a second US office in Los Angeles. Outside the US, our teams work from London, Zürich, München, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Lima. We serve US companies nationwide from our two US offices; for city-specific information see our pages for Chicago, Dallas and Houston. Read who Vivaldi Group is and how we work.