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The holiday season is when retail is won and lost, and it is also one of the most revealing periods for understanding competitor strategy. During peak, brands cannot hide their priorities. Messaging, promotion cadence, assortment shifts, and pricing decisions become especially clear as retailers respond to real-time demand pressure.
Although competitive benchmarking should be a year-round practice, the holidays offer a rare and highly visible snapshot of what is working, what is falling short, and where brands are placing their biggest bets heading into 2026. If you know what to look for, each shift in messaging or promotion strategy becomes a strategic clue.
Below is a framework to help you interpret the holiday behavior you are seeing and turn those insights into stronger planning for the year ahead.
Messaging adjusts quickly during peak as retailers respond to customer behavior. These shifts often serve as early indicators of performance issues or emerging priorities.
Messaging is often the earliest and most public indicator of how a competitor is feeling about performance. A noticeable shift in tone can signal that certain categories or launches did not meet expectations, and consistent messaging around value or gifting can reveal where volume must move quickly. Because messaging changes faster than pricing or inventory, it gives you an early read on what competitors believe is resonating and where they are encountering friction. You can explore more about how brands use data and visual merchandising to refine promotional storytelling in this guide on using data to refine your promotions strategy.
Promotions accelerate or decelerate based on how well demand is tracking. Watching the pace of these changes can tell you more than the discount itself.
Promotion pacing gives you real-time insight into how competitors are performing without waiting for quarterly results. A gradual build tells you that a retailer is maintaining margin and managing inventory well, while sudden aggressive discounting is often a sign of missed reads or excess stock. Understanding these patterns helps you gauge competitive pressure in your category and reveals where you may have room to preserve margin or where you may need a more defensive stance.
New product launches that appear deep in the holiday season often indicate strategic adjustments based on in-season performance or early reads on upcoming trends.
Late season newness drops are rarely accidental. When a brand releases new product deep into the holiday cycle, it often reflects a combination of risk management and opportunity seeking. These launches can highlight emerging microtrends, point to categories where performance is lagging, or signal that a brand is validating concepts before committing to them in 2026. Tracking these movements shows you where competitors believe near-term opportunity exists and where they may be preparing to double down next year.
Inventory behavior exposes real confidence levels. Stocking decisions, exclusions, and restocks are harder to mask during peak and reveal which products are driving demand.
Inventory behavior reveals how confident a retailer truly is in its assortment. Restocks are a direct indicator that demand is exceeding expectations, while thinning size availability shows where customers are concentrating their interest. When categories are excluded from promotions, it often means retailers are protecting margin on items they believe will continue to perform. These patterns help you anticipate demand shifts and identify categories that may see increased investment or pullback in 2026. You can learn more about how inventory, pricing, and assortment decisions show up in the data in this assortment and pricing insights webinar.
The value of monitoring competitor behavior during peak season is not only in seeing what retailers do but in understanding what these actions reveal about strategy, performance, and risk tolerance. Holiday behavior functions as a live testing ground for consumer response, and the insights taken from it allow you to refine your own pricing, assortment, and promotional plans for the year ahead.
Holiday competitor behavior is full of information, but only if you can see it quickly and in context. EDITED gives merchandising, buying, planning, and marketing teams real visibility into what competitors are doing and why it matters.
With a CMI tool like EDITED, you can:
These insights support better decisions, stronger margin protection, and more accurate planning for 2026.
To see how EDITED can help your teams respond faster and plan smarter, you can book a demo.
