Pervasive Insights™ · Alongside the portal
What your competitors charge, where they are stocked, what they launched and what people are saying about them, collected every month across the retailers and markets you compete in, and read by researchers who know your category.
Pervasive Insights is a synthetic research panel built on a client's own human research: a searchable library of every study the client has run, and synthetic respondents calibrated to how that client's real customers answered, with the error reported topic by topic. It is a City Research Solutions product. City Research has run consumer research since 1979.
Most brands track their competitors by hand: a spreadsheet of shelf prices someone refreshes when there is time, a few Google alerts, and whatever the sales team heard at the show. It is a snapshot, usually of one market, and it cannot see the things that only show up as a series: how long a rival has been on promotion, how fast its reviews are accumulating, whether it is quietly adding retailers.
Our competitive intelligence program replaces the snapshot with a time series. Automated collection runs against the named retailers in each market to a fixed product master, the professional and consumer conversation is monitored continuously, and a researcher who knows your category turns both into a monthly pulse and a quarterly briefing. Where the signals disagree is usually the most useful finding.
It runs as a City Research program alongside your Pervasive Insights™ portal, and every sweep and listening report is indexed into your Research Stack as a dataset, so a shelf-price question and a customer-perception question can be answered in the same place.
Price, promotion, availability, channel coverage, assortment, review velocity and product detail, by retailer and market, monthly or quarterly.
Share of voice, sentiment, the recurring arguments, and which creators and educators are associated with which brands, tracked over time.
Counterfeit and near-mark detection across the global marketplaces where your product turns up without your permission.
Price index, share of purchase, SKU count, channel depth and presence score by market, refreshed on the sweep cadence, with every tile marked measured or modelled and the open question of the quarter stated in plain language.
The headline
Most talked about, fourth on the list. The brand leads the category on share of voice and presence score [social listening, modelled] and on channel depth and price stability [sweep, measured], while placing fourth on one influential enthusiast site's best-of list for the year. We track the list because it is the kind buyers quote to each other, not because it measures anything.
Brand watch · this quarter
| Your brand | B | Advancing: clear momentum, identifiable weak spots |
| Rival 1 | C | Holding: mixed signals |
| Rival 2 | A− | Commanding: gaining on most dimensions |
Composite of price, assortment, coverage, purchase and conversation, graded on competitive position this quarter, not product quality.
Open question this quarter
Either a brand losing relevance while holding distribution, or one about to launch into shelf space it has already secured. Neither method resolves it; the diary would, by showing whether Rival 2 appears in shortlists.
Watch · sweep
Flagship coverage recovers? monthly
Watch · social
Counterfeit chatter volume monthly
Watch · diary
Rejected-model reasons quarterly
Generic durable-goods category. Figures and brands are illustrative, produced under sample conditions, not from a client program. Tiles marked measured come from the sweep and the diary; tiles marked modelled come from social listening and carry a stated precision caveat.
Why a research firm runs it
Automated collection tells you what happened. Only a person can tell you why. We sell both, and the combination is the product.
The earliest signal and the least precise. It will tell you a brand is gaining ground weeks before it reaches a shelf, but not what anything costs or what anyone bought.
What actually landed, at what price, in how many retailers. Measured, not modelled, and only possible as a series if collection runs as events happen.
A panel member buys any brand, logs it while the decision is fresh, photographs the receipt, and tells us what came second and why it lost. The only method that asks a person. Part of our online research services.
What we collect
Collecting from seventeen retailers is straightforward. Deciding what counts as the same product across markets and across waves is category judgment, not a coding problem, and it is what breaks a price series when it is done poorly. That is why a researcher builds the master before the first sweep runs.
| Signal | What it tracks |
|---|---|
| Price | Selling and list price by retailer, discount depth, spread across the market, currency |
| Promotion | Whether a model is on promotion and how many months of the year it has been |
| Availability | In stock, out of stock or delisted, by retailer and market, as a time series |
| Channel coverage | How many retailers carry each model, which ones, and how that count moves wave to wave |
| Assortment | Launches, discontinuations, variants, and the count of live models per brand |
| Demand proxy | New reviews per model per month and movement in average rating |
| Conversation | Mention volume, share of voice, sentiment and themes by brand; creator and educator associations; platform, geography and language |
Everything in the suite is built on studies fielded by City Research Solutions. Explore the research services behind it.
Programs are built from the three signals in any combination, at the cadence and market count that fits. The first conversation is about your category, not a package.
Talk to us about your category