The new spycraft of marketing: Brands decode rivals’ influencer tactics

As influencer-marketing budgets surge, but return on investment (ROI) lags, brands are demanding concrete, actionable insights into what actually works, fuelling the rise of a new service sector focused on in-depth competitor analysis.

Brands turn to rival forensics

Major consumer brands have begun enlisting influencer-marketing agencies to conduct forensic studies on rival campaigns. These studies analyse factors such as the influencers who were tapped, the budget behind each campaign, who drove the highest engagement, and, most critically, what the return on investment looked like. The shift comes in response to complaints from brands about heavy spends yielding disappointing returns, making data-backed strategy more urgent than ever.

“The playbook for an optimal influencer campaign is in constant flux, driven by the ever-shifting social media algorithm," said Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, co-founder of influencer marketing SaaS platform Qoruz. “For a brand, navigating this churn by itself is painful, especially when huge sums are riding on creators as a massive bet with no standalone guarantee of ROI."

According to Bhuvaneswar, Qoruz has been offering competition analysis as an additional service to its bundle of influencer-marketing data services to brands for over a year, with demand strongest among multi-category ‘house of brands’ that operate multiple direct-to-consumer labels.

Bhuvaneswar observes an ecosystem dynamic: in any competitive group, one brand inevitably stumbles on a winning campaign model, and rivals rush to adapt that formula until it loses its edge. As influencer-marketing expenditure rises across categories, adopting proven tactics from competitors looks less like imitation and more like prudent risk management.

Competitor-analysis pricing varies by client size, number of competitors, analysis duration, and content volume. Smaller brands can start at around ₹15,000, while deep-dive studies in crowded markets can run up to ₹500,000.

Booming demand

Qoruz isn’t alone in this space. Other SaaS platforms have also entered the competitor-analysis game, and are riding the wave of the high demand for rival data. Astatine, an influencer marketing Saas platform started offering this service just two weeks ago, quickly locking deals with eight brands and targeting a 50% increase in sales by next year on the back of this offering.

“Competition analysis solves the key problem of low return on investment in the ecosystem. With data-backed strategies based on successful campaigns in the same category, brands are not just taking a shot in the dark but an educated guess directly impacting their ROI," said Dhruv Khurana, co-founder of Astatine.

Khurana explained that their process scrutinizes every detail: whether campaigns were paid or organic, which influencers or user-generated content types drove results, granular KPIs (key performance indicators) like engagement and comments, and even the demographic profile of the audiences who took action. They also try to figure out the themes of the campaigns that are being run by their counterparts. For brands, these insights help them make more precise budget allocation and more reliable influencer selection.

Unlike Qoruz, Astatine offers this as a standalone service, separate from their software, though brands can couple it with that. It works on a credit-based system where the user buys credits and uses them to select the number of competitors and duration it needs the analysis for. However, to put it simply, Khurana calculated an entry-level cost based on the breakdown of the credits. “For ₹7,000, brands can analyse one competitor for an entire year including full audience insights," Khurana said.

Though the service is currently marketed to brands, Khurana suggested there is untapped opportunity in offering similar competitive intelligence to influencers themselves, allowing creators to outmanoeuvre their peers with smarter content and partnership decisions. So far, however, the cost has meant only brands have signed up.

Brands use rival insights

For brands that actively use influencer marketing, these new tools are about testing, not blind mimicry. “It’s important to keep a close track of your competitor’s strategy not just to copy-paste their mantra, but to understand what worked for them," said Kriti Malhotra, influencer marketing manager at Kenvue, formerly the consumer healthcare division of Johnson and Johnson . The company uses a SaaS platform to regularly benchmark rivals, then carefully experiments with new influencer categories before shifting its overall strategy.

“If we identify that a certain category of influencers are helping [a competitor] get better engagement and traction, we don’t change our strategy overnight," she explained. “We run experiments with a small fraction of influencers in that category from our pool to see if that works out for us as well. This trial and experiment helps us find our perfect mix."