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The Competitive Monitoring System · Chapter 2 of 8 · 4 min read

The Watchlist: Brands, Ingredients, Categories, Funnels

The first piece of the system is also the simplest in appearance: the list of what you track. Appearances deceive — because most tracking lists are actually lists of anxieties: the two or three rivals who irritate you, placed there because you know them, not because their moves would change your decisions. A good list is composed the other way around: you start from the decisions you have to make and choose the entities whose moves could change them.

In RavenBI, the mechanism is a single star: any brand, ingredient, category, product, funnel, or formula has a ⭐ — you tap it, and the entity joins the Watchlist, under the machine's continuous observation. What you do with this power is the subject of the chapter.

What you'll be able to do after this chapter

  • compose your watchlist on four layers — rivals, terrain, raw material, constructions — starting from your decisions;
  • size the list correctly: wide enough to see, narrow enough not to become noise;
  • understand what the tracking triggers: where the tracked entities' changes appear and who brings them to you.

The principle

A strategic watchlist has four layers, and each answers a different question:

  1. The rivals — the brands whose moves concern you directly: the main competitors, plus the two or three "dangerous ones" identified with the tool from chapter 3, not yet big but accelerating toward you. The layer's question: what are the ones hunting my customers doing?
  2. The terrain — the categories and problems you compete on. Here the tracking catches what no individual brand shows you: entry waves, cooldowns, standard shifts. The question: is the terrain shifting under me?
  3. The raw material — the ingredients of your formulas and the ones you're weighing for launches. Ad activity, usage in the market's formulas, and — as the claims guide showed — regulatory decisions all flow through the ingredient. The question: is anything moving at the foundation of my products?
  4. The constructions — the competing funnels you study as models and your own bets to track over time. The question: has any construction I use as a reference changed?

The right size comes from a simple test, applied to every entry: if this entity makes a big move, does it change any decision of mine? If no decision comes to mind — star off. A list where everything is important is a list where nothing is anymore: the filters in chapters 5 and 6 work all the more cleanly the more intentional the list is.

Once composed, the list becomes the backbone of the whole system: Home shows you at every visit which tracked entities moved and how many stayed quiet, the alerts from chapter 6 can be tied to it, and the weekly report from chapter 7 has a section dedicated to it.

The workflow in RavenBI

  1. Open the Watchlist (Monitor section) and inventory what you already have — if the list exists, ask yourself honestly how many entries pass the decision test and how many are just anxieties with a star.
  2. Compose the rivals layer: from Brands, put ⭐ on the direct competitors. Don't stop at the ones you know — the Fast movers view (chapter 3 covers it at length) shows you who is accelerating in your market right now.
  3. Add the terrain: from the category pages, ⭐ on the categories you compete in. Then the raw material: from Ingredients, ⭐ on your formulas' ingredients — heroes and carriers alike.
  4. Close with the constructions: from Funnel Radar, ⭐ on the reference funnels studied in the other guides. The final list, grouped by type, is all visible in the Watchlist — with each entity's latest moves.
  5. Put five minutes of hygiene in your calendar a month from now: any entry that produced no relevant information and no longer passes the decision test comes off the list. The watchlist is alive or it isn't at all.

How to read the signals

  • Tracked entity with frequent, relevant moves = the core of the list — the system exists exactly for it;
  • Entity silent for months = not necessarily to remove — a main rival's silence is information too; what gets removed is only what no longer passes the decision test;
  • Big move at an entity you almost removed = the classic sizing lesson — the list is trimmed on decisions, not on boredom;
  • Too many moves to read = the list is composed too wide or your reaction filter (chapter 8) isn't installed yet — usually both.

The typical mistakes

  • tracking only brands — half the surprises come from the terrain and the raw material, not from the nominal rivals;
  • starring everything that looks interesting — interesting is not a criterion; the decision is;
  • composing the list once and never touching it again — your market six months from now has other players; the list must catch them;
  • confusing the watchlist with the system — the list only defines WHAT is tracked; chapters 5-7 define how it reaches you, and chapter 8 what you do with what arrives.

Exercise

Compose your watchlist on the four layers, with the decision test applied to every entry: the rivals (including at least one fast mover you didn't know), the terrain, the raw material, the constructions. Next to each layer, write in one line the decision it protects. The list with its arguments is your system's first concrete deliverable.

The rivals layer deserves a dedicated tool, because the question "who matters in my market?" has three different answers — the big, the fast, and the new — and each reads differently. Next chapter: Leaders, Fast movers, New entrants.

Guide overview