Competitive analysis dominates B2B marketing and sales strategies. Companies diligently research, to the point of obsession, feature comparisons, pricing matrices, and positioning statements, all with the goal of outperforming the vendor on the other side of the deal.
The issue is that this approach assumes the competition is still another vendor.
Which isn’t necessarily true.
Today’s B2B buyers rarely move through a straightforward evaluation process in which they compare two or three providers before making a decision. Instead, they navigate an ecosystem of information sources, AI tools, peer communities, consultants, internal stakeholders, and existing workflows long before they ever schedule a demo.
By the time a sales conversation begins, many buying decisions have already been heavily influenced by forces that don’t appear on any competitive analysis.
“The companies we compete with aren’t always agencies anymore,” said Robin Emiliani, Chief Growth Officer at Catalyst Marketing. “Sometimes we’re competing with an internal team convinced they can solve the problem themselves. Sometimes we’re competing with an AI-generated answer. Sometimes we’re competing with the decision to simply wait another quarter.”
It’s a paradigm shift that fundamentally alters how marketers should think about competition.
Differentiation has largely meant proving that your solution was better than another solution. Product, service, support, and testimonials were the determining factors that drove sales operations.
Of course, those are still important elements. But they are no longer the principal determinants in such a competitive landscape; they are expectations. Today, marketers often have to convince buyers that making any decision at all is better than maintaining the status quo.
A significant competitor is often inertia.
This is particularly evident as AI becomes a larger part of the buying journey.
A prospective customer no longer begins every purchasing decision with a Google search. They may ask ChatGPT for recommendations, summarize vendor capabilities through Perplexity, or use Google’s AI Overviews to narrow the field before ever visiting a company’s website.
In those moments, the competition isn’t simply another brand.
It’s the AI’s ability to provide an answer that feels “good enough.”
Where Buying Decisions Are Being Made In 2026
Private Slack or LinkedIn communities, executive peer groups, podcasts, newsletters, consultants, and professional networks increasingly shape purchasing decisions before vendors ever enter the conversation. Buyers often gather recommendations, validate assumptions, and pressure-test ideas in environments that many marketing teams may not directly observe or influence.
As buying journeys become more diasporic, competitive landscapes become more difficult to define.
This has important implications for demand generation.
Many organizations still optimize campaigns around outperforming known competitors. But modern buyers are evaluating much broader questions than “Which vendor should I choose?” They are asking:
Can we build this internally?
Should we hire a consultant instead?
Can AI solve enough of this problem that we don’t need outside help?
Should we simply postpone the decision until next year?
Those alternatives may not share your product category, but they absolutely compete for the same budget, attention, and executive buy-in.
As a result, competitive positioning is becoming less about feature differentiation and more about reducing uncertainty.
Buyers aren’t simply purchasing software, services, or platforms. They’re purchasing confidence that making a change is worthwhile.
This is driving the importance of thought leadership, category education, and brand trust in B2B marketing. Long before buyers compare capabilities, they’re evaluating credibility. They’re deciding who understands the problem most deeply and who they trust to help solve it.
In an environment where AI can summarize feature lists and consultants can package common practices, genuine expertise becomes harder to commoditize.
That doesn’t eliminate the need for competitive analysis. Quite the opposite. It broadens the scope and the necessity of what competitive analysis actually looks like.
Understanding traditional competitors still matters. But so does understanding the forces competing against action itself.
The organizations that recognize this shift are likely to approach marketing differently. Rather than focusing exclusively on outperforming rival vendors, they’ll spend more time helping buyers navigate uncertainty, articulate the cost of inaction, and build confidence in change.
Because in today’s buying environment, winning often has less to do with beating another company and more to do with becoming the clearest path forward.
