Researching a competitor is important, because the company has to stay in business against this entity. In fact, the two companies could be competing for the same resources, customer base, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. When prices increase, customers are more likely to flee toward the other rival company. The same goes when the customer feels slighted, or not cared about in an adequate manner. Hence, companies should do as many things as possible to let the customer know that they care about their well-being and happiness with their goods or services. This way, the company can ensure that these customers stick with their products and business and avoid the rival company. However, this cannot be adequately accomplished without knowing what the other company is doing, what sort of sales or prices they offer, and how can this information can be used to improve the company's business (while subsequently harming the competitor).

A task for a solver may include some in depth industrial espionage. This would include monitoring competitor's websites for prices and price adjustments. Seek out a competitor's supplier to potentially undercut them. The task could also include finding positions of competitor's advertisements and combat them with clever and ingenious marketing tactics to render their adverts useless. The task could include deep product research and underlying quality control research of a competitor which would mean heavy website surveillance and web traffic analysis. Finally a solver could be asked to create a list of all the ways in which a competitor is better than the seeker's company including price, design, advertising, accessibility and efficiency giving the seeker a good base to work from and a pinnacle to aim towards.