This AI prompt just gave me my competitor’s whole playbook.. while I made lunch.

Copy this into AI Agent Mode - 

"You are a competitive brand strategist for interior designers.

Your task is to research and deliver a comprehensive competitor intelligence report and SWOT matrix for an interior design business targeting high-income residential clients in the specified region. (replace with your target market or add your brand command) 

Begin by asking whether the user would like to provide a shortlist of known competitors to include. If they don’t, independently identify design studios in the region with a similar ideal client profile.

Your report must include:

• A table listing 10 relevant competitors who operate in or near the target location and appeal to high-end residential clients
• A SWOT analysis for each competitor with detailed insights across Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• A breakdown of each competitor’s brand including:
  • Website link
  • Key messaging and quotes from their homepage or about page
  • Tone of voice and how they communicate value
  • Service offerings
  • Any publicly available pricing or fee structure information
  • Target client profile based on language and brand presentation
  • Social proof (such as awards, media mentions, testimonials)
  • Visual identity or aesthetic direction

Then, reverse-engineer the strategic positioning by identifying:

• The brand and messaging tactics competitors are using to attract high-end clients
• The common themes in language, style, and offers across the competitor set
• Gaps or opportunities in the market the user could consider leveraging

Provide clear section headers, tables where helpful, and a final summary of key takeaways to help the user improve or differentiate their brand.

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Transcript

0:29

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander and Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now, let's get designing your own success. I almost didn't get a podcast episode out today, I'll be honest. I was like, oh my gosh. If you're listening to this on Thursday morning, Wednesday was my husband's birthday, and so I'm just quickly recording something tonight because I've been flat out with group and private coaching clients. Which is exactly, it's by design. It's exactly what I wanted is to be really busy in the lead up and sort of end everything at the end of October and have a whole month to get my family prepared for our big holiday. So I am loving it, but it is keeping me on my toes. I've got some prerecorded interviews ready to go though, so look forward to sharing one of those with you next week. But I thought I would give you a really quick podcast around, so I thought I would share with you a little AI hack today or a little trick, and it's something that most interior designers that I'm working with privately have been blown away by and I wanna get incredibly techy when it comes to teaching you about agent or genic AI or agent AI mode. But it is in your chat, GBT five, it was in your chat, GBT 4.0 as well. And I think it's. Such an underutilized tool. Now, often we're gonna do deep research or AI mode for something we wanna go quite in depth on. And maybe we don't want to be the ones scraping different websites, finding different sources. You can get a trend report or there's a lot of user cases for designers that are amazing. For example, if you wanna find out what all the hottest kitchen trends out of Milan were this year, it could run a whole report for you by scanning the internet for every article and every opinion, and giving you kind of a briefing, which is fantastic. So you can imagine there's lots of ideas about how you could use it. Today I am pulling back the curtain on how to use AI's new agent mode to instantly get a competitor matrix. Normally I wouldn't really talk too much about competitors. Run your own race, stay in your own lane. I'm a big believer. I don't really look around at what people are doing, but it is important to understand what's out there in the market, what's happening in the market, and what you're up against, I guess, in terms of your local area. I'm gonna give you the exact prompt that I use when I'm coaching my private clients and show you other ways that agent mode can save you time as a designer. Inside of chat GPT five agent mode can do things for you instead of you doing them manually. So you can ask it, give it a big prompt, and then go away and have lunch and come back and the whole report's written or the thing is done, it acts a bit like your assistant and pulls it all together for you and then reports back to you. So it's. Pretty cool. You can also just sit back while you're eating that lunch and watch it moving around on your computer and it updates you. Like it says, I'm scanning for this, I'm doing this, I'm learning that. I'm pulling this together. I'm up to this part. So it's kind of fun to watch as well while you are doing something else out of one eye, kind of going, oh yeah, my agent's over there doing a full audit on my website. How fun. You'll see agent mode in your chat, GPT settings if you've got plus. So you have to have a paid chat GPT account. But if you press on the plus down the bottom as though you are going to upload a file, you'll see a few different modes, like deep research. That's another one that I love, or agent mode. So agent mode lets you run bigger prompts to automate some workflows or pull together detailed outputs like trend reports, summaries, or integrations with your tools like Google. I'm promise I'm not gonna make this one really hard. I just want you to go and meet agent mode if you haven't before, and that's why I'm giving you my exact prompt because you can let it go. I know it works. I know the results are helpful, and then you can start saying, okay, well I've used Agent AI once, I can do it again. So of course every designer I coach is always like, am I pricing right? Why do clients pick a different studio or everyone's got like an arch nemesis. We are actually not a very aggressive industry. I think everyone is very helpful, but there's always that one person who picks up. Work that you lose and vice versa. So there's always generally someone that you would really like to go deeper into their business or know a bit more about. So instead of guessing that stuff, you can absolutely just run a massive SWOT analysis of 10 competitors in and around your postcode. Or even if you wanna name 10 people that you'd like to see what their weaknesses are, what their strengths are, what their opportunity to do is, or you know the threats, you could do that as well. So this is the exact prompt and you don't need to know how to code. You just need to go to the show notes. I'm gonna put the prompt there. Copy the prompt, go to AI mode, press on the plus. Choose AI agent. And drop in this exact prompt. You just have to customize it to your postcode and your competitors. So you wanna ask the agent to find the top 10 interior design studios, nigro suburb, insert suburb, look at what language they use on their websites, and build you a table that breaks down their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then it gives you a market level SWOT analysis summary and key takeaways. The goal of this is not to copy anyone else, it is just to see patterns or behaviors. Certain studios use more emotional language and have these sorts of outcomes. It's about, if everyone's talking about timeless interiors, but no one's talking about sustainability, that's a gap and you can plug it. If most people are really weak on showing their process, you can make sure that you are very clear on your website about exactly what the client will do. There's just, it's really good analysis piece and really amazing to understand. It helps you to stop competing blind, so we're not just kind of going in and assuming things. You get a real sense of like, ah, okay. And asking it to do more of the analysis piece means that you get an objective. Chacha Peti goes in and says, oh, these, these guys do this really well, but they fall down on this, and they're very good at that, but they don't do that. And you can sort of agree or disagree or just go a little bit deeper. As I mentioned, you're gonna get those language cues that resonate with high-end clients or, or like-minded clients to your ideal clients. And in fact, when we do a competitor matrix, it's absolutely not to copy. It's so that you can avoid copying or blending in. You can see what they do and do something entirely different in the market. Go grab that prompt out of the show notes. I'll pop it there for you. Let it like do your customization, put your own postcodes or your own competitors, your business and let it do its thing and come and tell me if you found it helpful. I think the table, it was really interesting to see what my competitors were doing and even for it to identify some people that I was like, wow, I wouldn't have thought that. They were a competitor of mine. I kind of hate the word competitor, but you know, whatever, because we offer such different things. But that made me feel really confident because I was like, yeah, that's not my jam. I am not going to be that full on, or I'm absolutely not about that. So I knew straight away, that's my point of different. You can use agent mode to do all sorts of things. Some of the things that I like a website audit. Brilliant. While you are having lunch, let the agent go deep on your website. Get in all the nooks and crannies and find out how you could be, you know, maybe give it a goal. I want to convert more people, or I want it to, or maybe you've got your Instagram, you're like, go over here, give me a full analysis report. It's, I, I wanna focus on growth, like, what's the plan? Another one, an Instagram caption bank. Feed it all of your past posts and ask it to generate 20 captions in your voice for your ideal client. Like I know we are using general AI for that anyway, but you can get agent mode to go and look at those same competitors and say what's been performing well for them on Instagram, or what performs well on TikTok. I don't really do this. It's not that I don't have time, I just, I don't mind. I quite enjoy creating content when I feel engaged with it and I wanna create for my own audience. And I kind of like beating to the sound of my own drum. Like I don't really, that's why I don't really like trends'cause it's like everyone's take on the same thing, but it's just kind of the same thing. So I prefer to show up and I'll do the occasional trend when I think it's really funny. But mostly I'm like, no, I think this would be helpful for my audience, or I think this is what my ideal client wants to see from me, and that's my guiding star. Not really what other people are doing, but if you want it to be what other people are doing, you can ask it to do them. You can get it to do a trend report, as I said, so ask it to scan European design magazines or North American or blogs and translate global design trends and what's happening in the Australian market and what's coming up next, and then like use it to. Build your authoritative content or thought leadership and really, you know, use it to micro learn. I wanna learn more about this every single week. So, write me an intense report that I can just read at my leisure. Agent mode is completely like having an operations assistant in your back pocket. You can just run Yeah, the matrix, the SWOT analysis. You see how powerful it is once you see it doing stuff for you, like, oh my gosh, like it can build out the trolley boards, it can, it can do. Mostly anything, as long as you can prompt it to do it. But I don't wanna get too ahead of ourselves. I think it's still a bit glitchy, if I'm honest. I've used it and sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. I prefer chatting to my GPTs because they're conversational and they're back and forth and it's not so directive, and I'm not like, do this, do that report back to me. But it has its place. And if you haven't used it, this is a really great way to start. Try it, play with it. You can't break it, you didn't make it. So go and have a play with AI agent mode and let me know what you think. I'll chat to you next week. Bye for now. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you've found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designer. Just like you for your daily dose of design business tips, and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at Oleander and Finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www.oleanderandfinch.com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.