Question

Topic: Strategy

War Gaming.. And Insight..

Posted by Anonymous on 2/6/2007 at 5:37 AM ET 125 Points
Hi All

I have a strange situation or atleast something that comes across strange to me.. So correct me if I'm wrong.
We realised a short while ago, that one of our core competitors, was walking away with a lot of market share, quite suddenly. So, we were taken by surprise.. When one of the Marketing colleagues, came to us, (CI Team) (me being a newbie to all this) the pro CI manager, sugessted to them to hold a war game to see how they could change their strategy to regain their strength in the market..
The marketing team agreed to hold such a war game, but I'm missing the point maybe..
My questions are:

Doesn't the team need to have drawn out clear objectives as to what they want to achieve from the war game?
Shouldn't there be some kind of a clear cut methodolgy to conducting these kind of things?
Do you just get driven by a vendor, who tells you how best to run your war game, and what you can achieve from it?

I'm all confused..

Any insight will be helpful..
Has anyone written an article on "War gaming" in this community? If yes, I will be glad to know if there are ceratin guidelines "best practice" to follow..

Thanks a heap!

Best
Quixxx








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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 2/6/2007 at 5:52 AM Member
    Ok- actually I'm confused too- by war gaming do you mean a workout session by mktg professionals in which they brain storm different ways of killing/ defeating competition?
  • Posted by Harry Hallman on 2/6/2007 at 8:05 AM Member
    In my opinion playing games is what people do when faced with hard competition and don't know what to do about it. Just get together and find out what the other company is doing and what you are not doing. And counter them and fix yourself.
  • Posted by adammjw on 2/6/2007 at 8:36 AM Member
    Is it a real life situation or just a game you want to engage in? Two different stories. The first is a negative-sum game, while the other may turn out to be a positive-sum game.Why?
    Positive -sum games offers its winners great rewards and even losers gain experience during those competitive challenges. Price competition is mostly a negative-sum game as the more intense and fierce it gets everybody loses and the profitability goes down.
    If it's for real try to figure out if it makes more sense to react aggressively or just accommodate the attack. Incremental break-even analysis might be helpful to estimate when you are better off and how much sales loss you can suffer before it is reasonable to retaliate.Moreover if you do are you sure your competition will not resort to deeper price cuts?

    Rgds

    Adam
  • Posted by Frank Hurtte on 2/8/2007 at 10:20 AM Member
    I have done war games where part of the team role played as the competitor.. and we had to anticipate their moves..

    As an exercise, it did some good because it put us in their heads for a day... we gained some insights that we may not have had otherwise..

    Plus, I like to do competitive thinking...
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