EXECUTIVE TAKEAWAYS
Competitive benchmarking is only as reliable as the competitor selected. Get this one decision wrong, and every downstream metric becomes confidently presented noise.
Brand recognition and in-market competition are not the same signal. The company most visible in a market's e-commerce and social channels today may not be the one an executive team assumes it is.
An established market position can create false confidence that the competitive picture has not shifted, which makes this error more likely for expansion brands than for brands just entering a market.
Fixing this does not require new data. It requires re-checking an assumption that was probably made once, years ago, and never revisited.
STRATEGIC CONTEXT
Southeast Asia's e-commerce landscape has fragmented and reshuffled faster than most brands' internal reporting has kept pace with. Platforms rise and fall in relative importance by market. Regional challenger brands build meaningful positions on Shopee or TikTok Shop within a single product cycle, often without the global visibility that would put them on a multinational's radar. For a brand that entered a market two or three years ago and has been operating there since, the competitor named in this year's planning deck is frequently the same one named in the deck from three years ago. The market has moved. The benchmark has not.
COMMON EXECUTIVE MISTAKE
The mistake is treating brand reputation as a proxy for market competition. Leadership teams tend to name their competitor based on who is largest globally, who receives the most trade press coverage, or who comes up first in an internal strategy discussion, rather than who is actually contesting the same shelf space, on the same platform, in that specific market, right now. This is not a research failure so much as a sequencing failure: the competitor is decided in a headquarters conversation, informed by global category knowledge, before anyone looks at what a shopper in that market actually sees when they search the category.
MARKET & OPERATIONAL REALITY
Global dominance and local e-commerce visibility are only loosely related. A multinational's brand equity can be strong enough to win the boardroom conversation about who "the competitor" is, while its actual presence on a specific market's leading platform is a token flagship store with minimal recent activity. Meanwhile, a brand with limited global recognition can hold the top unit-sales position in a subcategory on that exact platform, supported by a locally built social following, more frequent promotional activity, and content built specifically for that market's shopping culture rather than translated from a global campaign. None of this shows up in a brand tracking study commissioned in the home market. It only shows up when someone actually opens the storefronts.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE
A well-run expansion brand treats competitor identification as a question that gets asked per market, per platform, and re-verified on a set cadence, not a decision made once at market entry and carried forward by assumption. It separates two different questions that are often collapsed into one: who do we compete with as a global category, and who is actually contesting our position for this SKU, on this platform, in this market, this quarter. The two answers are frequently different, and both are useful, but only one of them should be informing a pricing decision or a promotional calendar for that specific market.
PRACTICAL BUSINESS EXAMPLE
Consider a scenario: a mid-sized personal care brand has operated in Vietnam for two years. Internally, its competitive reporting names the multinational category leader it competes against in every other market it operates in. When the brand's actual storefronts on Shopee and Lazada are reviewed directly, that multinational has a barely active flagship presence in Vietnam, with limited recent listings and modest follower counts. A Vietnamese regional brand, one that does not appear in the expansion brand's global competitive tracking at all, holds the top unit-sales position in the same subcategory, with a fast-growing TikTok following and two years of localized content the multinational has never matched. Every pricing decision, every promotional calendar, and every internal claim about "closing the gap" has been made against a competitor that is barely present in the market that actually matters.
STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATIONS
Before setting a competitive target or pricing position in any market, confirm competitor identity using current, market-specific, platform-specific evidence, not global brand recognition carried over from elsewhere. Treat that confirmation as something that needs periodic re-verification rather than a fact established once at entry. And keep the two conversations separate: global brand positioning is a legitimate discussion, but it should not be the input that decides who a local commercial team is actually being measured against.
APPLYING THIS THROUGH THE SAMANA INSIGHTS FRAMEWORKS
This is precisely the problem Samana Insight’s Brand Performance Analysis framework is structured to prevent. Its first stage exists to force a deliberate, evidence-based competitor identification, verified against visible market signals, before any subsequent awareness, availability or pricing comparison is run. Once that competitor is confirmed with real evidence rather than assumption, the natural next question for many expansion brands, how their own pricing actually compares, is where our other framework on Price Research Analysis also becomes relevant. Neither framework is useful without the other happening in the right order.
CLOSING INSIGHT
The question worth asking is not who is our biggest competitor. It is who is actually contesting our position, on this platform, in this market, right now, and how do we know.
Explore how Samana Insights' Brand Performance Analysis framework structures this verification process for every Asian market a brand operates in.
