Delivering strategic realignment through War Games

Posted by | Fuld & Company

A global leader with over 50% market share in a narrow, but highly profitable segment of the food and nutrition market wanted to understand the impact that a large potential M&A deal by a rival global FMCG business would have on their market share and product sales.

Objective

The company needed to develop ideas to anticipate competitive threats. They also needed to understand the key business drivers behind the competitor’s activity and determine how they might be vulnerable to any competitive action.

Solution

• The company decided to run a War Game workshop. In preparation, the Fuld team:
  • Developed a list of the company’s key concerns about the M&A activity which was then used as a basis for research
  • Interviewed key opinion leaders and regulatory figures to understand:
    • growth prospects
    • characteristics of the market
    • legislation that could provide barriers to entry
  • Developed briefing books per competitor for each team in the war game
• Fuld then ran a two-day War Game workshop involving three internal teams playing the roles of key industry competitors and the company itself.
• During the War Game the teams investigated and analyzed eleven different likely scenarios, ranked by importance and relevance.

Outcome

The war game resulted in six key recommendations, leading the company to:

• Develop strategies to focus on industry partnerships
• Re-align current product positioning
• Launch a new product range
• Re-focus their category management to leverage trade relationships and counter the competitive threat posed by the competitor.
• Conduct a re-branding exercise that enabled the company to develop product positioning messaging that directly countered the emerging competitive threat, and potential threats from other competitors.
• Change product marketing and optimize it to mirror the competitors’ products, allowing the company to further develop their market share

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Tags: War Gaming