What’s Broken Across a Catalog This Big?

The Prompt

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Compare this prompt to the Ultima teardown. Same job, one written as a formal spec and one typed out in a hurry, lowercase and unedited. Both work. Naming the four things you care about matters far more than the polish.
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What You Get Back

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An enterprise-scale teardown across 3,096 SKUs and $414M of trailing revenue. The story is a brand growing 36% year over year while leaking value at the seams.

Growth is coming from skincare and haircare, not makeup, and none of the top five revenue SKUs are the traditional makeup stars. Mascara, the home category, is slipping to #3 at 10% share while Tarte surges. Pricing discipline holds under $20 and breaks above it: buy-box suppression nearly triples and in-stock collapses to 12% in the higher tier, so the more expensive the product, the less reliably the brand owns its own listing. One Collagen moisturizer lost $1.49M year over year while sitting at 98% buy-box suppression. And four adjacent categories worth more than 700,000 monthly searches, including lash serum at 250,000, are owned by DTC specialists.

The catalog hygiene findings are what a big brand will recognize. Shade and multipack bloat across a 640-SKU hair color range, and a manufacturer field splintered across five spellings of the brand's own name with no flagship storefront.

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Data It Touches

Brand search, subcategory competitive sets, product research across the full catalog, buy-box and stock data, search term volumes, ad spy.
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Go Deeper
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• Rank the out-of-stock and suppressed SKUs by revenue at risk
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• Which of the whitespace categories is closest to our existing equity
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• Show me the shade and multipack tail selling under $800 a month
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• Who took the mascara share we lost, and what did they change
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Where It Gets Soft

Revenue and share are estimates, useful for gaps between brands rather than exact levels. Stock and buy-box figures are a snapshot and move week to week, so re-pull before acting on a specific SKU. On a catalog this size the SKU counts by subcategory depend on how Amazon has each listing filed, and misfiled listings will shift the composition.

Pairs with the Ultima teardown. That one shows the pattern on a focused 62-SKU brand, this one shows it holding up across 3,096 SKUs. Together they answer "will this work at my scale" for almost anyone.

Where Is This Brand Leaving Money on the Table?

The Prompt

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The Content / Pricing / Advertising / Whitespace structure is the reusable part. Swap in any brand and it holds. Naming the audience as executive is what keeps the output tight instead of exhaustive.

What You Get Back

A presentation-ready teardown built around four moves. The lead finding is a brand under-charging for its own quality: Ultima carries the best rating and best listing quality of any top-five brand in Electrolyte Replacements, yet averages $26.58 against a $34 category average and $39 to $42 for Liquid I.V. and LMNT.

The rest is a map of leaks. Competitors are bidding on Ultima's own brand term, 192,000 searches a month with 35 brands advertising against it, while Ultima runs 2% ad-spend share against Liquid I.V.'s 12%. It ranks 40th to 45th on the generic head terms where the category actually shops. Its flagship SKU has a keyword-thin title, revenue sits stranded behind listings at 78% and 93% buy-box suppression, and its price ladder is a barbell with nothing in the $28 to $42 band that holds the category's volume.

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Data It Touches

Brand search, subcategory competitive sets, product research across the catalog, organic ranks, search term volumes, ad spy.
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Go Deeper
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• Which of these fixes pays back fastest, and what is each one worth
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• Show me the exact terms where they rank outside the top 20 with real volume
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• Who is bidding on their branded term and how much share does each hold
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• Run the same teardown on [COMPETITOR] so I can see both sides
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Where It Gets Soft

Revenue and share are estimates, so read the gaps between brands rather than the absolute figures. Buy-box suppression and in-stock percentages move week to week, so re-check before you build a plan on a specific listing. Search volumes are directional and best used for ranking terms against each other.

Also works as a pitch diagnostic. Run it on a prospect instead of a competitor and the four sections become your agenda for the first call.

Who Is Taking My Category, and What Do I Do About It?

The Prompt

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Note the shape. Name the subcategories, name the brand to center it on, ask what the challengers are doing, then ask what to do about it. Adding "tell me any other findings you can from the data" is what surfaced the strongest insight in the whole report, which nobody thought to ask for.
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What You Get Back

A seven-section briefing across $56.9M of combined monthly revenue in three subcategories. The framing the analysis lands on: the challengers did not take shelf space, they built a bigger shelf next to it, and they are now climbing toward the price band the incumbent depends on.

The structural read splits the three subcategories cleanly. Sauté Pans is a fortress at 40.7% share and gaining 17 points month over month. Skillets is where the fight is, with a 4.5 point share loss in a single month, the largest decline in the subcategory, while nine of eleven tracked challengers gained. Two very different situations that would blend into nothing if you looked at the brand total.
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The Findings That Were Not Asked For

Branded search leakage. 65% of clicks on the brand's own name go somewhere outside the top three results. 76,735 searches a month, 15 brands advertising against it, CPC at $5.96.

Channel leakage the rivals do not have. 1.76 sellers per ASIN against 0.83 to 1.01 for every challenger. The competitors run single controlled seller accounts with no diversion.

Revenue is gift-driven, not replacement-driven. From December to February the incumbent fell 83%, from $34.3M to $5.9M. The largest challenger fell 57% in the same window. One business is a Christmas present, the other is a kitchen restock, and the second is a far more durable base. That comparison is the sharpest thing in the report and it came out of the catch-all question at the end of the prompt.

Astercook is the one to watch, not the biggest player. 379% growth on 70 ASINs is not catalog spam, it is a small number of very well executed listings, which means the capability exists to move upmarket whenever it chooses.
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The Capability Most People Miss

The report identifies each challenger's registered selling entity, which is how it separates manufacturers selling direct from resellers and white-label operations. That distinction changes the competitive read entirely, and most people do not know it is available.
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Data It Touches

Market share by subcategory, brand search, seller entity records, product research across price bands, search terms, ad spy.
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Go Deeper
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• Show me every ASIN the challengers hold above the $80 price band and how they are performing
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• Who is bidding on our branded term and what share does each one take
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• Map every seller carrying our listings, ranked by offers and revenue
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• Run the same analysis in [ADJACENT SUBCATEGORY] before they get there
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Where It Gets Soft

Seller entity records show a registered business address, which is not the same as where a product is made or where a company is run. Describe what the records say rather than drawing conclusions past them, especially in anything customer-facing.

The seasonality comparison rests on two points in one season. It is a strong signal and worth a full 24-month view before treating it as settled. Click share and CPC are modelled estimates. Revenue and share are estimates throughout, so read the gaps between brands rather than the absolute levels.

How Is Pricing Actually Structured in This Category?

The Prompt

Run as two turns. The first pulls the analysis, the second turns it into the artifact.
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The two-turn pattern is worth copying. Ask for the analysis first, then ask for the artifact. Trying to get both in one prompt usually costs you depth on the analysis.

What You Get Back

A five-page market snapshot of the Amazon US Children's Vitamins subcategory: $11.2M monthly revenue across 327 ASINs and 93 brands, four serving-size tiers, every top listing normalized to cost per daily serving, multipack economics, share of subcategory revenue with month-over-month movement, and a key findings page.

The headline the prompt was not asked for: a 17x spread in cost per daily serving, from $0.08 to $1.38. MaryRuth's took the #1 share position at 31% by selling dosing efficiency rather than a lower sticker price, letting a $22.64 bottle beat rivals on cost per day. SmartyPants quietly halved its dose to cut per-day cost from roughly $0.83 to $0.60.

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Data It Touches

Subcategory and market share data, product research across the top revenue listings, ad spy for the share-of-spend comparison.
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Go Deeper
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• Which brands are winning on cost per serving rather than sticker price
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• Show me the newest ASINs in this subcategory and what claims they lead with
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• Who is advertising hardest relative to the share they hold
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• Run the same normalized pricing analysis in [ADJACENT SUBCATEGORY]
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Where It Gets Soft

Cost per serving depends on the labeled day-supply from the listing, which brands write themselves and sometimes state loosely or not at all. Spot check the dosing on any listing you plan to quote. Revenue and share are monthly estimates. The whole picture is a snapshot and drifts with pricing and promotions, so date-stamp it before sending it anywhere.

Is Our Growth Coming From Ad Spend or From Off-Amazon Demand?

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This prompt is short but it asks a genuinely hard question, and the shape is worth copying. It states the relationship (agency, this client), asks an attribution question rather than a reporting question, and names the audience for the answer. That last part changes the output: "I need to report this to stakeholders" produces a defensible recommendation instead of a data dump.

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The Question Underneath

Most growth reporting tells you a brand grew. This asks why, which is the question a CFO actually asks before approving more budget. On Amazon that attribution is genuinely difficult, because paid and organic lift look similar in a revenue line.

The way to get at it is to compare three trends against each other:
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• Ad spend share over time against revenue over time. If spend is climbing in step with revenue, growth is bought. If revenue is outrunning spend, something else is driving it.
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• Branded search volume against generic category search. Branded demand growing faster than the category is the fingerprint of off-Amazon activity, since nobody searches a brand name because of a sponsored placement on a generic term.
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• Organic rank movement on the head terms. Rank gains that hold without spend behind them point to conversion and relevance rather than budget.
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Where those three disagree is the finding.
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What You Get Back
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Swig Life · Account Growth Brief

Is growth coming from Amazon PPC or off-Amazon demand?

An incremental-spend read for the board conversation.

Amazon US Trailing 12 months SmartScout market data

Bottom line

There isn't much growth to attribute yet

Swig's revenue is flat-to-seasonal over the trailing 12 months. Before deciding where to put incremental dollars, the board needs to see that neither channel is currently generating net growth — the real opportunity is in two specific gaps.

0.24%

PPC isn't the growth engine

Ad spend is $27.3K TTM — about 0.24% of revenue. It's defending brand terms, not driving the topline.

–32.6%

Off-Amazon brand demand is softening

Core branded search (“swig”, “swig tumbler”) is down 6.5–32.6% over 12 months — awareness isn't the driver either.

0.47%

The real gap is category-term invisibility

Swig holds 0.47% share of voice on non-branded category terms, versus 6–12%+ for Stanley, YETI, and Owala.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 02

Revenue trend

Monthly revenue tracks the holiday calendar, not a channel

$1,800K$1,350K$900K$450K$0K

Aug-25

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Jan-26

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul-26

Reading it

—Nov–Dec spike ($1.26M → $1.60M) is the holiday gifting window, not a paid push — ad spend is flat all year.

—12-month average MoM growth is –3.2%. Outside the holiday months, revenue oscillates in a $0.4M–$1.0M band.

—Units track revenue almost 1:1, so this isn't a pricing effect — it's genuinely fewer units outside peak season.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 03

Paid media benchmark

Swig spends like an organic brand — because it mostly is one

Ad spend as a share of revenue, TTM

Swig Life

0.24%

Stanley

0.22%

YETI

0.32%

REDUCE

1.62%

Simple Modern

1.22%

BrüMate

2.46%

What this tells us

—Swig (0.24%) sits right next to Stanley (0.22%) and YETI (0.32%) — the two most organically dominant brands in the set.

—BrüMate, Simple Modern, and REDUCE all spend 5–10x that ratio — they're buying visibility their organic presence doesn't yet earn.

—So Swig isn't under-spending in isolation — it's under-spending relative to a brand its organic size, not relative to Stanley or YETI.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 04

Share of voice

Swig owns its name, but is nearly invisible past it

On Swig's own branded terms OrganicPaid

Swig Life

SANDJEST

LARQ

Greens Steel

Simple Modern

BrüMate

On non-branded category terms

6.02%

Stanley

2.99%

BrüMate

2.11%

Simple Modern

0.47%

Swig Life

0.22%

REDUCE

For reference, category leaders Owala (12.55%) and Contigo (7.84%) sit off this scale — both almost entirely organic.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 05

Off-Amazon demand proxy

Core brand demand is cooling;new product lines are heating up

12-month branded search growth

“swig”–6.5%

“swig tumbler”–32.6%

“swig 40oz tumbler w/ handle”+19.9%

“swig lunch box”+7.2%

What's actually growing

—“swig lunch box” search volume is up 264% in 3 months and 1,837% in 6 months — a genuinely new demand pocket, likely social / off-Amazon driven.

—“swig 40oz tumbler with handle” is up 19.9% over 12 months, the one core-product term still growing.

—The head terms are both declining, meaning overall brand awareness for the flagship tumbler line is not being refreshed.

—Competitors show the same pattern: Simple Modern's head term is down 57.5% while its lunch box, backpack and bento terms are up 115–1,730%.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 06

Competitor patterns

Spend alone doesn't explain growth or decline

Brand12-mo growthAd spendPattern

BrüMate ↑ +18.9% $1.30M Heavy PPC plus genuine off-Amazon demand growth on specific SKUs (water bottle +186%, slim can cooler +2,315%). Paid and organic pulling together.

REDUCE ↑ +74.8% $195K Moderate spend (1.6% of revenue) with a real May-26 volume spike — smaller base, but the clearest revenue growth in the set.

Simple Modern ↓ –18.9% $1.17M Heavy spend but declining — core brand term down 57.5%. Spend is propping up new SKUs, not rescuing the flagship line.

Swig Life ↓ –3.2% $27K Minimal spend, flat revenue, declining core brand search. Growth, where it exists, is coming from a new product line — not either channel.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 07

Recommendation

Where incremental dollars should go

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Buy category-term visibility

Swig is nearly absent (0.47% SOV) on non-branded terms where BrüMate and Simple Modern are winning share with paid alone. This is open whitespace, not a defended position.

2

Back the lunch box line off-Amazon

It's already generating organic demand on its own (+264% search in 3 months). Off-Amazon content and social investment here compounds faster than defending the core tumbler term.

3

Don't expect PPC to fix flat revenue alone

Simple Modern proves heavy spend doesn't offset a declining core term. Any new spend should follow the demand signal above, not blanket the whole catalog.

Simply Sales · Swig Life growth driver analysis 08

Data It Touches

Ad spy for spend share over time, brand search for the revenue trend, search terms for branded versus generic demand, organic ranks, market share for category context.
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Go Deeper
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• Show me branded search volume against category search over 24 months
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• If we hold ad spend flat next quarter, what does the data suggest happens
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• Which terms are we winning organically versus buying
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• What are the competitors gaining share doing differently on spend

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Where Does This Brand Actually Make Its Money, and What Should It Do About It?

Another packaged workflow rather than a single prompt. Name a brand, get back a 5 to 7 page report on where that brand actually makes its money and what it should do about each position.
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What It Does

The report answers four things for one brand: which three subcategories carry the revenue, how the brand stacks up in each on share, ad spend share, rank, and month-over-month trend, who leads the category and who the closest competitors are by revenue, and one concrete action per subcategory.

The only required input is the brand name. Add a recipient and it prints a "prepared for" line on the cover.
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What Comes Out

Run on Medicube, the report finds a tension worth the whole page. The brand is the outright #1 in all three of its largest subcategories, and all three are contracting month over month: Serums down 6.2%, Masks down 13.9%, Toners down 16.2%. Meanwhile total brand revenue is up 9.5% month over month and roughly 214% over twelve months. Growth has quietly moved to newer lines while the hero categories that built the brand erode.

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The Analytic Move Worth Stealing

The report divides ad spend share by market share, then reads the ratio. Same brand, three subcategories, three opposite recommendations:

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That middle column is why the report is useful. Most analysis tells a brand losing share to spend more. Here the fastest-eroding subcategory is the one already spending well above its share weight, which points at creative, listings, and price rather than budget. Two competitors spending far below their share weight are the only ones growing, which makes the case harder to argue with.
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Data It Touches

Brand search for the overall footprint, market share by subcategory, subcategory brand rankings for leader and competitor sets, product research to verify the subcategory mix.
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Go Deeper
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• Run the same report on the two closest competitors and compare the spend ratios
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• Which newer lines are carrying the growth, and how fast are they scaling
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• What did the brands gaining share change in the last 90 days
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• Rebuild this quarterly so the month-over-month reads as trend instead of noise
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Where It Gets Soft

Picking the top three subcategories is the step that decides whether the whole report is right, and the fast way to get them can under-report on brands with long-tail catalogs. In testing on one brand it returned subcategories summing to roughly $580K against an actual total near $1.98M, missing the brand's single largest line. For any brand with hundreds or thousands of ASINs, verify the mix against the product catalog before committing to the three.

Everything else carries the usual caveats. Revenue, share, and ad spend share are estimates. An undisclosed ad spend share is not zero, and reporting it as zero makes a different claim than the data supports. Month-over-month movement on a single month is noisy, so read it against the twelve-month trend before calling it a direction.

Get Me Ready for a Strategy Meeting on This Brand

The Prompt

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Three things make this one work. Assigning a role sets the voice. Numbering the data to pull means nothing gets skipped. And ending with "best moves today" forces a recommendation instead of a summary. Use this shape whenever you need something you can walk into a meeting holding.

What You Get Back

A briefing tight enough to read in the parking lot. Roughly $1.05M monthly revenue, $13.5M trailing twelve, 56 ASINs, the highest average selling price of any major honey brand at $117.76, and a single seller controlling 98.3% of GMV.

The read that matters: the brand is up 20.5% year over year but down 9.8% last month, and its share still ticked up because the category fell faster. Losing more slowly than everyone else is a defensive win, not an offensive one.

The strategic call is a reframe. The threat is not the mass-market leader bleeding share at the bottom. It is Manukora at the top, the only premium Manuka peer gaining share, doing it with 12 ASINs against 49 and higher ad intensity, by owning a sub-$30 entry tier the brand has left empty. That gap is roughly $270K a month being conceded.
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The Competitive Set

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The Three Moves It Lands On

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1. Plug the entry-tier hole. Launch a sub-$25 Manuka SKU against Manukora's $13 to $25 doorway. Capturing 30% of that ceded segment is roughly +$80K a month.
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2. Lean into ads on the flagship tiers. Under-indexing at 7.2% ad share while owning the highest-margin SKUs in the category, and three of the top five peers are retreating, so CPC pressure is loosening. A rare offensive window.
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3. Build review density on ultra-premium. The $175 UMF 26+ SKU carries 709 reviews against the flagship's 5,700. That credibility gap costs conversion on the highest-margin tier.
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Full Briefing Output
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• Brand snapshot. ~$1.05M monthly, $13.5M trailing twelve, 56 ASINs with 49 active in Honey, $117.76 average selling price, 19,404 monthly units, 4.61 stars across 26.6K reviews, brand score 8.2. Storefront live with one seller at 98.3% of GMV.
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• Concentration. Revenue clusters in UMF 20+, where three of the top four SKUs carry roughly $398K a month, about 38% of the brand. The UMF 24+ and 26+ tiers price at $108 to $186 on thin review bases, which reads as the fastest available lift.
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• Category. Honey runs $9.88M a month and $136M trailing twelve across 427 brands and 1,975 ASINs, average price $34.05. Up 23% over twelve months, down 3.0% last month in a broad contraction. Channel mix is 70% third-party seller, 30% Amazon retail.
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• Movers. Nature Nate's went zero to 1.07% share in a single month on 5 ASINs at roughly $89. MJO added $76K with an odd profile, 2.9 stars on 94 reviews at $51. Desert Creek gained quietly at a $67 average price. Nate's, Wedderspoon, Manuka Doctor and Manuka Health all fell between $40K and $300K.
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• Other whitespace. Subscribe and Save plus multipack bundling looks under-captured given daily-wellness positioning. The honey dipper adjacency sits at 2 ASINs and 4% share and declining, which is the worst of both options.
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• Watch list. Nature Nate's, to work out whether it is a new brand, a rebrand, or a pricing anomaly. MJO, whose rating and velocity do not fit together.
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Data it touches

Brand search, product research across the top ASINs, subcategory and market share data with month-over-month movement, ad spy for share of spend.
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Go deeper

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• Build the case for the entry-tier SKU with pricing and volume assumptions
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• Show me Manukora's full price ladder and which rungs convert best
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• What happened to the brands losing share, and is any of it recoverable demand
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• Pull the same briefing on [SECOND BRAND] so I can compare before the meeting
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Where It Gets Soft

Single-month moves are noisy. The 9.8% monthly decline here sits inside 20.5% annual growth and a category that fell 3% in the same window, so read the month against the year and the category before calling it a trend. Revenue and share are estimates. The note about a competitor's rating not matching its velocity is an inference worth investigating, not a finding, so keep that framing if it goes in front of a customer.