Competitor Location Analysis: What to Measure and How Often
A map of competitors is a starting point. Overlap, saturation and rate of change are what make it a decision tool.
- Author
- HuiTu Technology
- Published
Nearly every company can name its competitors. Far fewer can say how many locations each operates, how those locations overlap with their own catchments, or which of them opened in the last six months. That gap is straightforward to close and unusually cheap relative to the value.
Build the universe before you measure anything
The dataset has to be complete and consistent before any metric derived from it means anything. That means tiled collection across the full study geography, deduplication on a documented key, and chain resolution so that trading names are grouped to the operator that owns them.
Chain resolution is the step most often skipped, and it distorts everything downstream. If one group trades under four brands, treating those as four competitors understates concentration substantially and makes a consolidated market look fragmented.
The four metrics worth tracking
| Metric | Definition | Tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Saturation | Competing locations per 10k reachable demand | Whether an area has room for another operator |
| Catchment overlap | Share of your catchment also served by a competitor | Which of your sites are genuinely contested |
| Net change | Openings minus closures per period | Whether a market is expanding or consolidating |
| Concentration | Share of locations held by the largest groups | Whether you are competing with many or with few |
Saturation and overlap are the two that change decisions most often. Saturation tells you where not to go. Overlap tells you which existing sites are underperforming for structural reasons rather than operational ones, which is a very different management conversation.
Overlap is where the surprises are
Compute travel-time catchments for your sites and for competitors, then measure the share of each of your catchments that a competitor also covers. Businesses regularly discover that a site they considered protected shares 70% of its catchment with two competitors, and that a site they were considering closing has almost no overlap at all.
How often to refresh
- Monthly for fast-moving categories such as food and drink, convenience retail and fitness, where openings and closures are frequent.
- Quarterly for most retail, services and hospitality. Frequent enough to catch expansion programmes early.
- Annually for slow categories such as large-format retail, where a monthly refresh mostly measures noise.
- Ad hoc before a specific decision, on top of whatever regular cadence you run.
The important part is that the method stays identical between runs. If definitions change, the change log measures your method rather than the market, and the whole series loses its value.
Reading the change log
Openings cluster. When a competitor opens three locations in adjacent areas within two quarters, that is a programme, not a coincidence, and it usually continues into neighbouring areas next. Closures cluster too, and a cluster of closures in an area you were considering is the cheapest possible warning.
The most actionable output is usually a short list: areas where competitive density fell this period, and areas where it rose fastest. The first is opportunity, the second is a market someone else has already decided is worth contesting.