Why brands are now spying on competitors’ influencer playbooks

As influencer marketing budgets increase while return on investment (ROI) lags, brands are demanding tangible, actionable insights into what actually works, fueling the rise of a new service industry focused on in-depth competitor analysis.

Brands turn to rival forensics

Major consumer brands have begun appointing influencer-marketing agencies to conduct forensic studies on rival campaigns. These studies analyze factors like influencers listened to, the budget behind each campaign, who drives the highest engagement, and most importantly, what the return on investment looks like. This shift comes in response to brands’ complaints that heavy spending yields disappointing returns, making data-backed strategy more urgent than ever.

“The playbook of the optimal influencer campaign is in constant flux, driven by the ever-changing social media algorithm,” said Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, co-founder of influencer marketing SaaS platform Qoruz. “It’s painful for a brand to manage this volatility alone, especially when large sums of money are being placed on creators as a big bet with no guarantee of a return on investment on its own.”

According to Bhuvaneswar, Qoruz has been offering competitive analysis to brands as an additional service to its suite of influencer marketing data services for over a year; Demand is strongest among multi-category “houses of brands” that operate multiple direct-to-consumer labels.

Bhuvaneswar observes an ecosystem dynamic: In any competitive set, a brand inevitably encounters a winning campaign model, and competitors rush to adapt that formula until it loses its advantage. As influencer marketing spending increases across categories, adopting competitors’ proven tactics looks less like imitation and more about prudent risk management.

Competitive analysis pricing varies based on customer size, number of competitors, analysis duration, and content volume. Smaller brands can start from approx. ₹15,000, and in-depth research in crowded markets can go up to 15,000. ₹500,000.

increasing demand

Korkuz is not alone in this field. Other SaaS platforms have also entered the competitive analysis game and are riding the wave of high demand for competitor data. Influencer marketing Saas platform Astatine started offering the service just two weeks ago, quickly signing deals with eight brands and targeting a 50% increase in sales by next year thanks to the offering.

“Competitive analysis solves the problem of low ROI in the ecosystem. With data-backed strategies based on successful campaigns in the same category, brands not only take a chance in the dark but also make an informed prediction that directly impacts their ROI,” said Dhruv Khurana, co-founder of Astatine.

Khurana explained that their process looks at every detail: whether campaigns are paid or organic, which influencers or types of user-generated content are driving results, detailed KPIs (key performance indicators) like engagement and comments, and even the demographic profile of audiences who take action. They are also trying to unravel the themes of the campaigns run by their colleagues. For brands, these analyzes help them make more precise budget allocation and more reliable influencer selection.

Astatine, unlike Qoruz, offers this as a standalone service separate from their software, but brands can combine it with it. It works on a credit-based system where the user purchases credits and uses them to select the number of competitors and the period of time for which the analysis is needed. But simply put, Khurana calculated the entry-level cost based on the distribution of credits. “For ₹Khurana said 7,000 brands can analyze a competitor for an entire year, including full audience information.

Although the service is currently being marketed to brands, Khurana suggested there’s an untapped opportunity to deliver similar competitive insights to influencers, allowing creators to outperform their peers with smarter content and partnership decisions. But until now the cost has meant that only brands have signed up.

Brands use competitor insights

For brands actively using influencer marketing, these new tools are for testing purposes, not blind imitation. “It’s important to follow your competitor’s strategy closely, not just to copy and paste their mantras, but to understand what works for them,” said Kriti Malhotra, head of influencer marketing at Kenvue, the former consumer health division of Johnson and Johnson. The company regularly uses a SaaS platform to benchmark its competitors and then carefully experiments with new influencer categories before changing its overall strategy.

“If we find that a particular category of influencers is helpful [a competitor] “We don’t change our strategy overnight to get better engagement and engagement,” he explained. “We experiment with a small portion of the influencers in that category in our pool to see if that will work for us as well. This trial and experimentation helps us find our perfect blend.”