Work out when a competitor changed, and what they changed to

Reverse their work from a few years back against their work now, and read the rebrand they never announced.

A competitor's redesign is a bet they paid a lot of money to place. Reading what they moved toward tells you what they think the market wants, which is market research somebody else funded.

Why this will not look generic: It compares two dated slices of one company's real output, so you are reading a decision somebody committed budget to rather than a trend piece about where design is heading.

What you walk away with

• Prompts for their old work and their current work
• Exactly what changed, and what they deliberately kept
• A read on what the change was trying to achieve

Typical run: 10 to 20 from each period. Two clearly separated periods beat a continuous sample; you are looking for a step change, not a gradient.

This one happens in one conversation

You bring: Their assets from a few years ago and their current ones, tagged by period. Archived pages and old app store screenshots both work.

Open with: These are one company's work from two periods. What changed, what did they deliberately keep, and what do you think the change was trying to fix?

What the thread holds on to:

• Both periods at once, so a step change separates itself from ordinary variation
• What it identified as retained, which is often more revealing than what moved
• The emerging theory, which you can test against specific assets

Then you can just ask:

• What problem does this change look like a solution to?
• Did they move toward or away from the category norm?
• Is there anything they dropped that was actually working?

What the reverse actually gives you

Point it at: A competitor's assets from two periods, several years apart.

What comes back (representative example): The change is a deliberate move toward the category centre. The older work used an unusual palette of olive and rust with hand-drawn illustration and asymmetric layouts. The current work is on blue and white, photographic, centred and symmetrical. What they kept is narrow but telling: the same generous spacing and the same serif for headings, which suggests the spacing and the type were working and the distinctiveness was not. The direction is away from the memorable and toward the legible, which is usually what a company does when it starts selling to a more conservative buyer than the one it launched with.

Things you would never have thought to type:

• spacing and heading type retained while everything else moved
• asymmetric to centred, which is a trust decision not a taste one
• hand-drawn illustration abandoned entirely for photography
• a move toward the category centre rather than away from it

What you change: Your own positioning decision. If they vacated the distinctive end of the category, that end is now empty.

How it works

1. Capture both eras (In Chrome) - Archived versions of their site and old app store listings are the easiest sources for the older period.
2. File by period - Two tags, clearly separated. You are looking for a step change, so leave the middle years out.
3. Read the decision (In Claude) - Ask what they kept as well as what they changed. The retained parts are the ones that were working.

Cost and time

This workflow runs at 2 reverses + about 1 minute. Your result carries automatically from each step into the next, so there is no re-uploading between tools. Reverses are billed from your reverse meter and generation steps from your AI Credits, both bundled in every pay-as-you-go credit pack.

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