Watch for marketing: competitors' messages, market topics and the rules on what can be claimed

What does marketing decide with market information?

• Which message sets the brand apart from what competitors already repeat.
• Which topics to work on in the content calendar before they become saturated.
• Which trade fairs and congresses to attend, and with what offer.
• Which claims to include in a campaign, especially comparative and environmental ones.
• How to respond to a competitor’s launch or price change.

What to watch and in which sources

• Competitors’ websites, press releases and published cases. The home page message, the sectors they target and the customers they cite change before their brochure does.
• Trade mark applications. TMview, the EUIPO’s database, allows searching at once across the trade mark registers of participating offices, including those of all Member States^[1]. A new trade mark filed by a competitor often precedes a launch.
• Specialist media. Topics appear there before they reach the general press.
• Trade fairs and congresses. Who exhibits, who sponsors and what each one presents.
• Mentions of the brand in media and websites: the context in which the organisation appears and alongside whom.
• Official Journal of the EU and the BOE. The rules on commercial communication and their transposition.

What can be claimed in advertising in 2026?

Three regulatory frameworks shape marketing messages in Spain in October 2026:

The proposed Directive on green claims, which would have required explicit environmental claims to be verified in advance, stalled in June 2025, when the Commission announced its intention to withdraw it^[9]. The fact that the Spanish transposition is pending is no reason to wait: according to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, many companies already apply the changes preventively across the European market^[7].

How to follow a competitor’s message over time

1. Capture the message with its date. Website headline, campaign slogan, featured sectors.
2. Link it to an event. A new message usually accompanies a launch, an alliance, an acquisition or a new market.
3. Compare it with what was said before. A change of narrative is only detected if you have kept how the competitor was speaking a year ago.
4. Use tone as a clue. Tone classification helps sort mentions; the final reading is by a person who knows the market.
5. Review other companies’ claims by the same rule as your own. A competitor’s generic environmental claim may be a risk for it and an argument for you.

Common mistakes

• Confusing volume of mentions with relevance. Ten replicated news items are worth less than one interview in the outlet your customer reads.
• Taking one-off snapshots before each campaign, with no history to compare against.
• Watching only known competitors. New entrants appear earlier in trade mark filings, at fairs and in funding rounds than in the sector ranking.
• Reviewing claims only in the legal department, when the campaign has already been produced.

What Innguma does for marketing

Innguma continuously monitors news and websites, competitors’ websites, regulation and the BOE, and specialist sources. Innguma’s AI groups duplicates and classifies each signal by category, entity, type of event and tone, and AI Feed lets you browse the content along those dimensions: by competitor, by topic or by tone. What the team validates is kept in the Library with its source and its date, which is what makes it possible to compare the market’s discourse over time. Newsletters with AI-generated summaries are sent from the Library.