To build a competitive landscape analysis deck, start from the decision the client has to make, define who counts as a competitor from the customer's point of view, and gather sourced evidence on each player before you draw anything. Then measure how concentrated the market is, place competitors on the two dimensions that actually decide who wins, and finish with what the landscape means for the client's next move. A strong landscape deck is an argument about where the client can win, not a stack of competitor profiles. AI saves the most time on gathering competitor evidence, structuring it, and building the slides. Choosing the market boundary, the positioning axes, and the recommendation stays with the team. The nine steps below follow a typical strategy engagement from the client's question to partner review.
Key takeaways
A landscape deck is judged on its "so what." Ten competitor profiles with no implication for the client is research, not analysis.
The market boundary is the first real decision. Define competitors by what the customer would buy instead, including substitutes and new entrants, not by who shares an industry code.
Every competitor claim needs a dated source. Competitor data goes stale fast, and one unsourced share estimate puts the whole page in doubt.
Choose the axes before you draw the map. A positioning map on generic axes such as price and quality rarely tells a client anything new.
AI is strongest at assembly and weakest at judgment. Profiling, extracting, and drafting speed up a lot. Market definition and the recommendation do not.
A competitive landscape analysis maps who competes in a market, how that market is structured, and where each player is positioned, so a client can decide where and how to compete. It appears in almost every strategy engagement, from market entry and commercial due diligence to pricing and acquisition screening, usually as the section the rest of the recommendation stands on.
The most common mistake is a deck that profiles every competitor, one per slide, ends with a generic two-by-two matrix, and never says what it means for the client. That gap is usually the first thing a partner flags in review. This guide is for consultants, strategy teams, and deal teams who want the deck to answer that question itself. It covers the nine steps, the exhibit that answers each question, and where AI helps.
Step 1: What decision is the landscape for?
Write the client's decision in one sentence before you name a single competitor.
An entry landscape shows where incumbents are weak. A pricing landscape shows who sets the price and who follows. An acquisition screen shows which players would change the client's position if bought. Start with one sentence: the client must decide X, so the landscape has to show Y.
Then name the audience. A leadership team that knows the market wants the implications fast. A board that does not know it needs the structure explained first.
Where AI helps: turning the engagement brief into a list of questions the landscape must answer, and drafting the counter-case: why the client might not be able to win at all.
Where it does not: deciding which question matters most to this client right now. That is judgment and it stays with the team.
Step 2: Who counts as a competitor?
Define the market from the customer's side: everything the buyer would choose instead.
The market boundary is the most important analytical choice in the work. Draw it too narrow and you miss the substitute eating the category. Draw it too wide and the share numbers stop meaning anything.
Sort the field into four groups: direct competitors selling the same thing to the same buyer, adjacent players selling to the same buyer from a neighboring category, substitutes that solve the same problem a different way, and new entrants or well-funded startups that could change the market within the planning horizon. Test the boundary against real buying behavior. Win-loss records and customer interviews tell you who the client actually loses to, which is often not who management names first.
Put the boundary on a slide: who is in, who is out, and why. A reviewer who disagrees can then argue with it openly instead of quietly doubting every number that follows.
Where AI helps: building a long list of candidate competitors from filings, industry reports, and product listings, and grouping them into the four buckets as a first cut.
Where it does not: deciding where the boundary sits. That decision is the analysis.
Step 3: Where does the competitor evidence come from?
Build one competitor tracker with a source and a date for every field.
Before any slide, build a single tracker: one row per competitor, the same fields for each. Typical fields are revenue or a revenue estimate, growth, segments served, geography, pricing model, channel, product scope, recent moves, funding or ownership, and headcount trend.
Public companies are the easiest place to start. Annual reports such as the US 10-K usually describe competitive conditions in the business section. Beyond filings, the useful sources are investor presentations, pricing pages, product documentation, job postings (a good signal of where a competitor is investing), patent filings, customer reviews, trade press, and expert or customer interviews. Private competitors usually need triangulation from several of these.
Record the source and date for each field as you go, so every figure that reaches a slide can be traced back and checked for freshness.
Where AI helps: this is one of its strongest contributions. It can read filings and websites at volume, extract the same fields for every competitor, summarize interview transcripts, and keep the source attached to each data point.
Where it does not: filling a blank field from its own memory. A confident, unsourced revenue figure for a private company is a risk, not a finding. Tell the tool to flag gaps rather than fill them.
Step 4: How concentrated is the market?
Estimate shares by segment, show your method, and measure concentration with a number.
Market structure tells the client what kind of fight they are in. A fragmented market invites consolidation plays. A market held by three or four large players invites niche or disruption plays.
Build share estimates by segment rather than in total. Triangulate private players from two or more sources, label each estimate, and make sure the shares sum to the market size you used. A Mekko chart that shows segment size on one axis and share within each segment is often the clearest single exhibit in the deck.
Then put a number on concentration. Most strategy decks use the combined share of the top three or four players: if the four largest players together hold 80 percent, the market is consolidated; if all four combined hold only 25 percent, it is fragmented. In deal and antitrust work, teams also use the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), the sum of every player's squared market share, which US regulators treat as highly concentrated above 1,800.
Where AI helps: calculating shares and concentration from the tracker, building the Mekko, and checking that segment totals reconcile.
Where it does not: choosing which revenue estimate to trust when two sources disagree. Make that call, then say on the slide why you made it.
Step 5: Which two dimensions decide who wins?
Position competitors on the dimensions customers actually pay for, not on generic ones.
The positioning map is the exhibit most landscape decks include and most get wrong. Price against quality puts every player somewhere plausible and tells the client nothing. Good axes come from the buying criteria: the two things that most often decide which supplier wins, backed by interviews or win-loss data.
Test the axes before you commit. If the map does not separate the winners from the losers, or the leaders from the rest, the axes are wrong. Once the axes hold, consider sizing each competitor's dot by revenue, so the same map also shows who is big and who is small.
From there, group competitors that compete in the same way, with similar business models, channels, and target customers, into strategic groups. Rivalry is usually fiercest within a group, and the gaps between groups are where white space shows up.
Where AI helps: scoring each competitor on candidate dimensions from the tracker, drafting the map, and rebuilding it quickly when you try a different pair of axes.
Where it does not: choosing the axes. The choice of dimensions is the insight, and it has to come from what customers told you.
Step 6: Does a Five Forces analysis change the answer?
Use Porter's Five Forces (rivalry, buyer power, supplier power, new entrants, and substitutes) only where it changes the recommendation, and back every rating with evidence.
Michael Porter's Five Forces framework, first published in Harvard Business Review in 1979, looks beyond direct rivals to buyer power, supplier power, the threat of new entrants, and the threat of substitutes. It is useful when the question is whether the market is worth being in at all, or when profit is being captured by someone other than the competitors on your map.
It is not a filler slide. If you include it, rate each force, give the one piece of evidence behind each rating, and say what it means for the client's move.
Where AI helps: drafting the evidence for each force from the tracker, interviews, and filings.
Where it does not: judging which force actually matters most. That depends on the client's position and strategy.
Step 7: What does it mean for the client?
Settle the implications and the recommendation before you build any slides.
This is the step that separates a landscape analysis from a competitor directory. Write down, in one sentence, where the client can win and against whom. Then list the two or three findings that support it, the main threat to it, and the moves it implies: segments to enter or exit, players to watch, partnerships or acquisitions worth testing.
Everything in the deck now supports the answer, qualifies it, or moves to the appendix.
Step 8: How do you build the deck?
Brief the tool properly, build from the competitor tracker you made in Step 3, and source every figure on the slide.
Once the analysis is settled, the deck is an assembly job, and that is where AI turns days into hours. A good brief names the audience and the decision, states the answer, sets the structure, points to the source files, and asks for full-sentence titles.
Here is an example brief for this deliverable, to adapt to your engagement:
"Build a 16-slide competitive landscape deck for [client]'s leadership team, who must decide whether to enter [segment] in [region]. Lead with the answer: where the client can win and against whom. Use the attached competitor tracker, share model, and interview synthesis. Show market shares as an editable Mekko and the positioning map as an editable matrix on [axis 1] and [axis 2]. Give each priority competitor one profile slide with the same fields. Every figure must tie to the attached files or a cited public source, with the date shown on the slide. Flag anything the material does not cover rather than filling the gap. Use full-sentence action titles."
The last three instructions are the ones that protect the deck in review. Dates on the slide stop stale data passing as current. Sources on the slide make the deck defensible. Flagging gaps stops an invented number reaching the client.
What goes in the deck
A competitive landscape deck usually runs in this order:
Executive summary: where the client can win and the three findings behind it
The question and the market definition: who is in, who is out, and why
Market size, growth, and concentration
Market shares by segment
Positioning map on the two deciding dimensions
Strategic groups and how each competes
Priority competitor profiles, one per slide, same fields
Recent moves, new entrants, and substitutes
Five Forces summary, included only if it changes the answer
White space and threats for the client
Implications and recommended moves
Appendix: sources, share method, interview sample, full competitor tracker
Step 9: How do you review it before the client sees it?
Check the argument first, then the evidence, then the dates.
Read only the slide titles, in order. If they do not tell the story on their own, the structure is wrong, and fixing the slides underneath will not save it.
Then pick the five figures a skeptical partner would challenge, usually the client's share, the leader's share, the market size, and the map positions that drive the conclusion, and open the source behind each. Check that every competitor figure carries a date. Finally, find where the evidence on a competitor is thin and make sure the deck says so. A client can work with a known gap. A gap found later damages trust in the whole analysis.
Which exhibit answers which question?
Each exhibit in a landscape deck should answer one client question, and each has a typical way of going wrong.
# | Client question | Exhibit | Evidence it needs | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Who are we really competing with? | Competitor universe map | Win-loss data, customer interviews, substitutes | Using an industry code list as the market |
2 | How concentrated is the market? | Share Mekko plus top-four share | Triangulated revenue estimates by segment | Shares that do not reconcile to market size |
3 | Who wins on what customers value? | Positioning map or bubble matrix | Buying criteria, pricing, product data | Generic axes such as price versus quality |
4 | Which competitors behave alike? | Strategic group map | Business model, channel, and segment data | Grouping by size alone |
5 | How is the market changing? | Competitive moves timeline | Filings, announcements, funding, hiring | Listing news without reading what it means |
6 | Can anyone earn good returns here? | Five Forces summary | Buyer, supplier, entry, and substitute evidence | Rating every force "medium" with no evidence |
7 | Where should the client play? | White-space and implications slide | All of the above | Ending on profiles with no recommendation |
How does Perceptis AI help build a competitive landscape deck?
Perceptis AI builds the landscape deck from your research with the structure and sourcing it needs, so the team's hours go to the judgment.
A competitive landscape deck has to read as one argument, show where every competitor figure came from, keep its charts editable as shares change, and arrive in the firm's template. Perceptis AI treats those as defaults. It structures decks top-down with MECE logic and full-sentence action titles. It works from the files the team already has, can search the web for information from reputable sources, and ties every factual statement to a traceable source, with clickable links in the web interface so a reviewer can open the original behind any competitor claim. It generates PowerPoint-native, editable charts, including Mekko, matrix, and bar charts, so the share exhibit and the positioning map can be updated when a number moves. The output is a native, editable PowerPoint in your own template, and the Knowledge Base keeps firm material such as past landscape decks and house profile formats on hand without re-attaching it for every request. For confidential client work, Perceptis AI is SOC 2 Type II compliant and does not train on customer data.
Expect minor cleanup after generation, and keep the market definition, the axes, and the recommendation with the team. The case studies show the output on real engagements, and you can run a landscape brief in the app to see how much of the first draft survives partner review.
Frequently asked questions
How do you build a competitive landscape analysis deck? Start with the decision the client has to make, then define the market from the customer's side, including substitutes and new entrants. Build a sourced, dated competitor tracker, estimate shares by segment, measure concentration, and place competitors on the two dimensions that decide who wins. Settle the implications for the client before building slides, and lead the deck with the answer.
What should a competitive landscape slide include? A competitive landscape slide should include a full-sentence title that states the conclusion, one exhibit that supports it (such as a share chart or a positioning map), a source and date for every figure, and a short note on what it means for the client. Profiles of every competitor belong in the appendix, not on the main line.
What is the difference between a competitive landscape and a competitor analysis? A competitor analysis looks closely at individual rivals: their strategy, products, pricing, and performance. A competitive landscape looks at the whole market: who competes, how concentrated it is, how players are positioned, and where the gaps are. A landscape deck usually holds short competitor analyses inside that market-level argument.
Which frameworks do consultants use for competitive landscape analysis? The most common are market share and concentration analysis (top-player share, plus the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index in deal work), positioning maps on two buying criteria, strategic group mapping, and Porter's Five Forces for industry profitability. The framework should follow the client's question. A deck does not need all of them, and a framework that does not change the answer should be cut.
Can AI do a competitive landscape analysis? AI can do much of the assembly: building competitor long lists, extracting data from filings and websites, summarizing interviews, calculating shares, and drafting the deck with sources attached. It should not set the market boundary, choose the positioning axes, or make the recommendation. Treat any competitor figure it produces without a citation as unverified.
How many competitors should a competitive landscape deck cover? Cover the full set in the appendix tracker, but keep the main line to the few players that actually matter to the client's decision. Those are usually the leaders, the closest competitor in the client's strategic group, and any entrant or substitute that could change the market within the planning horizon.
