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Keep shoppingCompetitive Strategy: Analyze Markets, Build Advantage [EN]
2,893 students
Competitive Strategy: Analyze Markets, Build Advantage [EN]
competitive strategy | competitive analysis | market research | osint research | brand positioning | strategic planning
Last updated 8/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Find information about a competitor that they did not publish about themselves
- Use Boolean operators, X-ray search and Google Dorks to reach what search hides
- Build a competitive analysis in days rather than quarters
- Estimate a competitor's unit economics from public signals
- Frame the strategic question so it can actually be tested against evidence
- Recognise the biases that make competitor analysis confirm what you already believed
- Build a positioning statement that separates you rather than describes you
- Turn the whole thing into a strategic plan with owners, metrics and dates
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
13 sections • 38 lectures • 20h 38m total length
Requirements
- A market you compete in and at least two competitors you cannot fully explain
- No research or marketing background required. Search technique starts from zero
- A browser you are willing to install a few extensions into
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to discover that your differentiator is also theirs
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Most competitive analysis is assembled from competitors' own websites and press releases. That is a summary of what they decided to tell you.
Why the three-column table never helps
Somebody builds a comparison of features and prices, presents it, everyone nods, and no decision changes. The reason is that the document contains nothing your competitor did not want you to have. Meanwhile the useful material — the roles they are hiring for, the conference talks their engineers gave, the documents indexed on their own domain, the customers quietly leaving reviews — sits in public and nobody looked. I have signed off on that three-column table more than once and called it market research.
What this course actually covers
Six blocks. First, gathering: Boolean operators, X-ray search into a specific site, Google Dorks, finding people and finding contact details — the technique for reaching public information that search does not surface by default. Second, market diagnosis from a marketing chair: a fast competitive analysis, estimating a competitor's unit economics, building a strategy the board approves, and the budget and return behind it. Third, framing the question so it can be tested rather than argued. Fourth, judging what you found — the biases that make analysis confirm what you already believed, and decision models for acting under uncertainty. Fifth, positioning: the six layers of a brand, auditing how you and they are actually described, and the messaging that separates you. Sixth, converting all of it into a strategic plan with owners, metrics and dates.
A note on the intelligence block
Everything in it uses public sources and nothing else. That block covers the ethics explicitly in its first lesson, and it is worth taking seriously: the techniques work, which is exactly why the line between research and intrusion matters. Use them on companies and markets, and apply the same standard to yourself when you check what is findable about your own organisation.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 38 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: search operators and dorks, the competitor strengths table, 4P, STP and Ansoff, the positioning formula, the messaging matrix, the two-day session agenda
Practical exercises run against your own market rather than a case study
Where to start
Pick one competitor and try to find out what roles they are hiring for and where their people spoke publicly this year. Whatever you cannot find in twenty minutes is what the first block of this course fixes. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Founders and executives who set direction against competitors they only half understand
- Strategy specialists whose competitive analysis is assembled from competitors' own websites
- Marketing leaders who need to defend positioning to a board
- Product and commercial managers deciding where to compete and where not to
- Consultants who have to produce a market picture quickly and defensibly
- Business analysts who want research technique alongside modelling
- Anyone whose company keeps being surprised by a competitor's move