See a Competitor Action Brief before you buy one
Every brief we sell is written after you pay, about your company and the competitors you name — so there is no file to show you in advance. What we can show you is the shape: the real structure, the real level of detail, and the real way we handle a finding we are not sure about. Below is a complete Competitor Action Brief, start to finish.
Everything below is free to read, in full, with nothing to sign up for. If you want one written about your competitors, that is the Competitor Action Brief ($499) — researched after you order, emailed to you, and refunded in full if it does not tell you something you can act on.
Competitor Action Brief — Harrow & Finch
1. Competitor moves
Finding 1 — Ostley & Vane cut its free-delivery threshold from £75 to £40 CONFIDENCE: HIGH
The change took effect on 1 September 2026 and is stated on their own delivery terms page. Two archived snapshots of that page, one from 12 August and one from 8 September, show the £75 figure replaced by £40. Standard delivery is still quoted at 3–5 working days; the change is to the threshold only, not the speed.
Source: competitor's published delivery terms, two dated snapshots — source links appear here in a real brief.
Finding 2 — Ostley & Vane raised dinnerware prices 6–9% across 14 lines CONFIDENCE: HIGH
Across a tracked list of 40 of their listed products, 14 dinnerware and glassware lines rose between 4 August and 15 September 2026. The smallest rise was 6.1% (a four-piece mug set, £32.00 to £33.95); the largest was 9.4% (a 12-piece stoneware set, £89.00 to £97.40). The remaining 26 tracked lines were unchanged. This is a category move, not a site-wide one.
Source: competitor's own listed prices, sampled on two dates — source links appear here in a real brief.
Finding 3 — Brambleford Living announced a second distribution site CONFIDENCE: MEDIUM
A 42,000 sq ft facility near Leicester, announced 11 September 2026. Medium rather than high because the only account of it is the company's own announcement, repeated by one trade title that adds no independent detail. There is no evidence in what we found that the site is operating, and no stated opening date. Treat "announced" and "open" as different facts.
Source: company announcement, 11 September 2026; trade press report, September 2026 — source links appear here in a real brief.
Finding 4 — Brambleford Living may be preparing a trade channel CONFIDENCE: LOW — LEAD, NOT TREND
Three job adverts for a "Trade Account Manager" were posted between 2 and 19 September 2026, and a /trade path on their site returns a login form rather than a 404. That is the entire evidence base. It is consistent with a B2B launch; it is equally consistent with a single replacement hire and a page that has existed for years.
Treat this as a lead to monitor, not a confirmed trend. Do not price, reforecast or restructure anything against it. The specific thing to re-check in 30 days is whether that login page becomes a public trade-pricing page, which would confirm it; if it has not changed by 24 October 2026, drop the lead.
Source: two job boards and the competitor's own site structure — source links appear here in a real brief.
Finding 5 — Ostley & Vane's paid search presence on your second-best term has risen sharply CONFIDENCE: MEDIUM
On a sample of 20 search checks for "linen bedding sale" in the week of 14 September, their ad appeared in 11. The same sample in the week of 17 August returned 2. Medium confidence because this is a sample of a rotating auction, not a spend figure: it tells you presence went up roughly five-fold, and it does not tell you their budget.
Source: repeated search-results sampling, two dated weeks — method described here in a real brief.
What was deliberately left out
Four things we went looking for and did not find. They are listed because an absence you know about is worth more than a paragraph invented to cover it.
- Brambleford Living's pricing. No material signal found. We sampled 30 of their lines on the same two dates as Finding 2 and every price was unchanged. There is nothing to report, and we are not going to characterise a flat month as "holding firm" to give you a fifth finding.
- Either competitor's actual sales or margin. Neither files the detail publicly at a useful frequency. Any revenue figure we gave you here would be a guess with a number attached, which is worse than no figure.
- Why Ostley & Vane raised dinnerware prices. We found the rise (Finding 2). We found nothing about the cause — no supplier statement, no interview, no announcement. Supplier costs, a range refresh and a margin decision would all look identical from outside.
- Any customer-sentiment shift. Review volumes on both competitors were too low across the period to read a change from. We looked; the sample does not support a conclusion.
2. Why it matters
Finding 1 sits directly on your order book. Your free-delivery threshold is £65. On your stated figures — £6.4m of revenue, roughly 86,000 orders, £74 average order value — about 38% of orders fall in the £40–£75 band, which is roughly 32,700 orders and £2.4m of revenue a year. That is the exact band a competitor has just made cheaper to buy in. The exposure is real; whether delivery cost is what decides those orders is not something this research can tell you.
Finding 2 hands you a price argument you do not currently make. Before the rise, your equivalents on those 14 lines were about 2% cheaper than theirs. After it, you are 8–11% cheaper on the same specification. You did nothing to earn that and you are not saying it anywhere.
Finding 3 only matters through one mechanism. A Leicester site shortens their delivery promise into the Midlands and the North, which is 31% of your revenue. Until it is actually operating, that mechanism has not started. This is the finding to watch, not the one to act on.
Finding 5 raises your cost of the same customer. A competitor appearing five times more often in one auction raises the price you pay in it. Your blended cost per acquisition is £16.40; a bidding contest on one term is the normal way that number moves without anyone deciding it should.
3. This week's decisions
Decision 1 — by Friday 2 October: do not match the £40 delivery threshold (from Findings 1 and 2)
This is the obvious move and we are advising against it. Dropping your threshold from £65 to £40 would apply to roughly 24% of your orders — about 20,700 a year — at about £4.90 of carriage each, so roughly £101,000 of margin a year, given away permanently and in public, to defend revenue that may not be leaving. Nothing in Finding 1 shows a single customer switching; it shows a competitor changing a number on a page.
Do this instead: run a three-week test on one category only, threshold £50, and measure conversion in the £40–£75 band against the same weeks last year. That costs a fraction of £101,000 and it answers the question the research cannot. Decide on the evidence on 23 October, not on the competitor's announcement.
Decision 2 — by Wednesday 30 September: publish the price comparison on the 14 lines (from Finding 2)
You are 8–11% cheaper on a like-for-like specification and nobody visiting your site knows it. Put the comparison on those 14 product pages and in this month's email. It costs nothing, it needs no discount, and it is the cheapest response available to you this week. Use your own prices and theirs as listed, dated, and re-check the dates before you publish — prices move.
Decision 3 — by Monday 6 October: cap the defensive bid before it becomes a habit (from Finding 5)
Set a hard £600 monthly ceiling on "linen bedding sale" and its two closest variants for four weeks, and re-run the 20-check sample weekly so you are reading the auction rather than guessing at it. Stop if cost per acquisition on those terms passes £22 — a third above your £16.40 blend is the point at which you are funding their presence rather than defending yours.
Explicitly not a decision this week: Finding 4. It is a low-confidence lead with a re-check date of 24 October and it should change nothing you do before then.
Sources
A real brief lists every page the research actually cited, title and link, exactly in this format. The entries below are invented along with the rest of this example and deliberately carry no URLs — a fake link that looks real would undermine the one thing this page is trying to demonstrate.
- Ostley & Vane — delivery terms page, snapshots 12 August and 8 September 2026 — source link appears here in a real brief
- Ostley & Vane — listed product prices, sampled 4 August and 15 September 2026 — source link appears here in a real brief
- Brambleford Living — distribution site announcement, 11 September 2026 — source link appears here in a real brief
- Trade press report, September 2026 — source link appears here in a real brief
- Job board listings — Trade Account Manager, posted 2, 11 and 19 September 2026 — source link appears here in a real brief
- Search-results sampling — "linen bedding sale", weeks of 17 August and 14 September 2026 — method note appears here in a real brief
What you supply, and what comes back
You supply two things at checkout: your company name, and up to five competitor names. That is all — both are public information, and there is no account to create, no data of yours to hand over and nothing to log into.
What comes back is a brief in the structure above: numbered findings on each competitor you named, a section connecting each one to your revenue or position, and three dated decisions each tied back to a specific numbered finding. Findings we are unsure of are graded and labelled as leads. Where the research found nothing, the brief says so by name rather than filling the space.
How fast: the research pass starts the moment payment completes and the brief arrives by email, usually within a few minutes. One payment, one brief, no subscription.
When this will not work
Two cases, stated plainly because you should know them before you pay rather than after.
A company with no verifiable public footprint. The brief is built from what a real research pass can actually find and cite. If a company you name leaves almost no public trace — a young private business, a brand that does not publish prices, a competitor that operates entirely offline — the brief will say "no material signal found" against that name instead of inventing a plausible move. If the whole pass comes back with too little to be worth sending, the system treats that as a failure and refuses to deliver it rather than dressing it up; the purchase is flagged for a human and you sort it out with us by email.
We would rather lose the sale than send you five paragraphs of confident fiction, because confident fiction is the exact thing that makes this category worthless. That refusal is the product.
Anything that needs private information. Their margins, their unit costs, their contract terms, their churn. This is public-source research done well and fast. It is not an investigation, and it will not tell you what is inside somebody else's accounts.
Three briefs, one underlying research pass, each aimed at a different decision. The worked example above is the Competitor Action Brief.
You already know who you compete with. You want to know what they changed this month and what to do about it.
You are deciding whether to enter a market. You want to know who already owns it before you commit budget.
You are raising. You want the competitive question answered before an investor asks it.
If it does not tell you something you can act on, reply to the delivery email within 14 days and we refund you in full. There is no form and no conditions to satisfy. We would rather refund you than have you feel you paid for filler.
General information and research only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. A brief informs a decision; it does not make one, and the figures in the worked example above are invented illustrations rather than market rates. Instilus is not affiliated with any company a customer names.