During hard times, you need equalising analysis. A competitor may have a low quality goodwill yet beat you in the sales - why? My guess: price and reviews.
Almost every purchaser uses reviews to help enable their purchasing decisions, and often times poor service experiences can be buried in the top reviews, which businesses often ignore. The ability to sort out reviews using sentiment analysis by their brand impact versus their product impact was a game changer.
Further, pricing is an impactful metric for converting. In the information age, the buyer has to do one query to sort by prices on their favorite product - make sure they realise your store has the best supply chain to provide quick, cheap comparative prices. The user only has to do a quick search whilst the company has to employ scrapers and tricks to figure out what the user would see - search competitor link comparing.
In the physical age, all a customer was working off was goodwill. This goodwill would bring in a customer to the store, and the friction of spending hours finding comparative prices would force them to make a decision in-store. That's flipped on its head through the digitalisation of shopping.
Without price comparisons, without search link comparisons, without review sentiment analysis, a brand has no idea what choices to make, what KPIs to aspire to, and how to generate new value. Instead, it's a game of hide and seek with arbitrary decisions and no quantitative or qualitative backing.
