Why Competitive Archetypes are Replacing the Spreadsheet

Your competitive analysis answers the question, “Here’s where the market stands.” But don’t mistake the resulting spreadsheet for a strategy.

Knowing where your competitors are is not the same as knowing what they can or can’t become. And answering that question is the only one that produces original positioning.

Competitive archetypes are how we get there. Archetypes aren’t a description of the current market, but a projection of where it will be — built from the evidence competitors leave like breadcrumbs, everywhere. We use classic Jungian archetypes — The Hero, The Outlaw, The Sage — not as creative metaphors, but as predictive models. When a brand adopts an archetype, they adopt its inherent strengths and, more importantly, its 'shadow.’ And knowing the shadow reveals the ways it will fail under pressure.

Program 11 was founded by two journalists, and it shows in how we work. We’re not just analysts looking for patterns. We’re also reporters looking for the story. That’s a different thing, and it changes what you find.

Here’s how we do it.

We start with what brands are doing

Most competitive work begins with websites, social channels, and a scroll through recent campaigns, and we start there too. But the most useful signals are rarely where a brand most wants you to look, which means the most important part of this phase is going past the surface.

For example, we read tone as carefully as we read messaging, because tone is itself a strategic choice. A brand that sounds confident to the point of swagger is telling you something about what it believes about its customers and itself – and so is a brand that sounds clinical, or relentlessly warm. The public voice a brand performs is its first tell, and it's almost always an unguarded one.

Then we get into the ad libraries, which most desk research skips entirely. Like a reporter tracking a source, we look at the Meta Ad Library to see every active ad running across Facebook and Instagram, including how long each one has been running. Longevity is the signal that matters: an ad that's been in market for six months is working, while a brand running fifteen variations of the same message simultaneously is one that hasn't figured out what works yet. The Google Ads Transparency Center and TikTok Ad Library round out the picture, showing not just what a brand is saying but where it's committing significant budget and what it's still testing.

SparkToro tells us who the audience actually is – what they read, who they follow, what they engage with – as opposed to who the brand claims to serve. We run each competitor's handle or URL through the platform and compare the resulting audience profiles against stated positioning, because the mismatches are where the most interesting archetype tensions surface. This is an inference, not a customer list – but it's a meaningful one. A brand positioning itself as premium whose visible audience indexes heavily on deal-hunting content is already in trouble. It just doesn't know it yet.

Then we look at what customers are actually saying

This is where the archetype earns its value as a CX tool, not just a brand strategy one.

Google, Yelp, Trustpilot – we read reviews not for overall sentiment but for the specific language people reach for when something goes wrong, because repeated phrases across hundreds of reviews, without any prompting, function as behavioral data. Reddit threads are useful for the same reason they're uncomfortable: people in communities like r/Frugal or r/whatcarshouldIbuy or r/SkincareAddiction are brutally honest in ways they rarely are on branded platforms. Social comments on a brand's own posts add another dimension entirely, and the gap between what a brand posts and how its own followers respond is often the clearest measure of the distance between promise and reality – which is, at its core, a CX problem.

Job postings are among the most underused sources in competitive research. A competitor suddenly hiring fifteen customer experience managers is a signal; a surge in technology roles points somewhere different – a platform overhaul, a personalization push, a capability gap they know they have. A new VP of Clinical Operations or Chief Experience Officer announces a strategic pivot long before any press release does. News coverage and trade press fill in the rest – what the brand is being written about, what it isn't, and what the industry says about it when the brand isn't in the room.

For clients with the budget for primary research, this is also where we get to ask the questions we most want answered – through surveys, interviews, intercepts, and video diaries. The gap between a brand's stated strategy and what customers are actually experiencing almost never surfaces in a desk audit. It surfaces in the unguarded moment at the end of a video diary when someone says what they actually thought. Getting to that moment is a skill that has less to do with research methodology than with knowing how to create the conditions where a real answer is possible. We know how to ask the question that doesn't announce itself as the important one. That gap, between promise and pattern, is often the most valuable thing in the archetype, and it's almost always a CX gap before it's a brand gap.

Building the archetype synthesis

Everything described above is evidence. The synthesis is where it becomes an archetype – and it has five components: the motivational core, the target customer, the vulnerability, the counter, and the whitespace.

The motivational core – what this brand most wants and most fears losing – is the organizing variable. Name both and the brand's behavior becomes legible. You can see where it will over-invest, where it will rationalize a failure instead of fixing it, and where it will be the slowest to change course.

Consider a “Magician” tech brand. Its motivational core is Transformation – the ability to make the complex feel like a miracle. That's a powerful promise, but it's also a structural pressure point: any friction, manual override, or technical glitch doesn't just slow the user down; it breaks the "spell" at the exact moment the user is most reliant on it. This is the archetype cracking at its seam, and these bugs register first as CX failures before anyone frames them as brand failures.

The target customer the brand is actually built for is often different from its stated target, and the divergence shows up plainly in the evidence – in the SparkToro audience data, in the review language, in which ad messages have been running the longest. When the brand a company thinks it is and the brand customers are actually experiencing come apart, that's the vulnerability.

The vulnerability follows directly from the promise, which is why every brand has one and most brands genuinely can't see it. The vulnerability is often the "Shadow" of their chosen archetype. Take the “Magician” tech brand. It’s built on the promise of "it just works," but every bug or sync error is a betrayal of that magic. When the seamless interface fails, the user doesn't just feel frustrated, they feel powerless, and they begin looking for a tool that values transparency over an illusion they no longer trust.

The counter is the harder question, and it's different from the vulnerability in an important way. The vulnerability is descriptive. The counter asks: what would a brand actually have to be — across every location, every interaction, every hire — to earn those customers and keep them?

For the Magician brand that just failed, the counter isn't just "better code." It’s often The Sage — a competitor that wins by offering Professional Grade tools, modularity, and total user control. That's not a campaign or a positioning statement. It's a CX and operational identity that has to be built. The answer often requires a company to confront something about itself it would prefer not to.

The whitespace is what nobody in the category is saying or doing yet. It's distinct from the vulnerability, which is reactive. If the Magician is promising "Magic" and the Sage is promising "Control," the whitespace might be The Mentor – the brand that doesn’t just do the work for you or give you the tools, but teaches you how to achieve the result yourself. This is where original positioning and experience design get made, after you've looked hard at every competitor's promise and found the thing none of them can credibly deliver.

What most competitive work misses

Most competitive analysis delivers the grid and stops there – here's the opening, it says, go take it. But an opening isn't a brand, and it isn't a CX strategy either. Knowing a competitor is losing customers doesn't tell you what kind of company you'd have to become to earn them – what you'd have to build, staff, train, and operate at every touchpoint to actually deliver on the promise they're breaking.

That's the question the archetype forces you to confront before you brief your creative agency, before you start closing gaps, before you tell your team what you stand for. It's as useful to the CX leader building a roadmap as it is to the marketing team writing a brief, because the answer belongs to both of them.

If you can't answer it, the research isn't done yet.