"Do you have any formats or templates we could use to lead the team through an exercise intended to anticipate and address potential competitive moves. We are assessing the impact of some of our new product launches, and attempting to proactively anticipate competitive reaction. Do you have any suggestions on how best to approach this type of exercise?"
There is a technique that I have used that worked really well in some training I was involved with and this came to mind, it is called THROUGH THEIR EYES
This was my suggestion:
"I have found that the exercise that I have used when done with senior people works really well. It was a "though their eyes" exercise where we got teams to think as the competitor would in reality.. So immerse them in recent launches etc and then get them to identify what drives the competition (e.g. is it insights, claims, spend, range etc), what their core competency is, how they make decisions (e.g. are they very centralised) and then get people to highlight that and based on that what they would do if they were acting like P&G or L'Oreal etc
I found that senior people really managed to think "though the eyes" of the competition and come up with very varied and different reactions that felt like the competition - and surprised the teams at how different it was to how we think as a company. A simple approach, which of course can then be costed and worked into more substance"
Do you have any better ideas and approaches that have worked for you? Please email me or leave a comment on the blog post right now!
Link to original post