Competitive Blind Spots
Competitive blind spots analysis maps what you see about the market that a rival doesn't, what they see that you don't, and what neither side sees, because the biggest threats and openings usually sit in the parts nobody is looking at.
The page splits into four boxes, what you notice about the market set against what a named rival notices.
Reach for this when…
- A competitor made a move that surprised everyone in the room.
- You keep assuming a rival will react the way you would.
- Something is changing in the market that neither you nor your competitors seem to be pricing in.
How to run it
- List what you know about the market that you believe your main competitor does not.
- List what they likely know or believe that you don't - study their moves, hires, and public statements for the assumptions behind them.
- Identify what's visible to neither side: emerging suppliers, new entrants, shifting customer behaviour.
- Test your competitor's likely assumptions against reality - are they still true?
- Act on your own blind spot first: it's the one costing you right now.
A worked example
Situation. Elena Ruiz ran Costa Contact Solutions, a BPO firm in Valencia, Spain, competing on price against three larger rivals who all assumed clients wanted the cheapest seat-hour available.
Applied. Mapping the quadrant showed her own blind spot was assuming the same thing - interviews with two lost clients revealed they'd left for slower, more expensive competitors offering dedicated senior agents.
Result. She repositioned one team as a premium, low-turnover option and won back one client within a quarter, at a rate her price-competing rivals couldn't match.
The catch
This only works if you're honest about your own blind spot, which is exactly the part people skip because it's uncomfortable to write down what you don't know. It also depends on genuinely researching the competitor rather than assuming you understand their logic. Done as a one-off workshop it produces guesses; done with real client and market research it produces intelligence.
The quadrant that gets skipped fastest in the workshop is always your own blind spot, and that's the one worth the most.
Origin: Johari Window (Joseph Luft & Harrington Ingham), adapted for competitive analysis