The competitor room comes of age
pharmafile | April 24, 2013 | Feature | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | MSI, competitor room
It was great to be back at SonoPharm, it was so still at this time of day and she went straight for the dashboard. Like most marketers, Cara likes to do things herself – she felt alive again just getting her hands back on the controls after all the launch build-up and a week off. It had been just so… worth it.
And now to business! Scanning the screen, her eyes burned into block after block of data lit up in red. Cara couldn’t believe it – There must some mistake, perhaps it hadn’t refreshed or something? She hit ‘print’.
The rest of the day went in a blur. “Whose assumptions went into the plan?” Cara’s boss was not known for an easy going nature. “Why didn’t we know about this?” A bead of sweat ran down Cara’s back. “What’s your action plan?” The questions kept coming.
Lunch brought no respite. Her colleagues knew something was wrong. They seemed to be avoiding her in case they caught the bad luck too. “Even the restaurant staff are disappointed,” thought Cara. Everyone had such high hopes. Her stomach turned over as though she had hit a hump-backed bridge.
So what went wrong? Like many before her, Cara’s plan fell victim to an aggressive competitor – someone in a building across town worked out a smart way to undermine SonoPharm’s launch. Of course it wasn’t all her fault, but Cara had been around long enough to know that someone had to take the fall and gut instinct told her exactly who it was.
Competitive strategy is one of the most exciting areas for a marketer. It’s dynamic, unpredictable, complex and high stakes – the things most of us relate to very well. What makes it fun is that there actually is someone just across town who is every bit as smart and knowledgeable as you are and wants to spoil your party pretty badly – a thought that occupies their every living moment.
Everyone has more or less the same data, we all recruit the brightest people from the same business schools, we have a product with a value proposition. Our planning templates and calendar keep us on track.
But these are really just points of parity – your entry ticket if you like. So how to gain that edge? Fortunately some things can really help an organisation create competitive advantage.
We all have our favourites and these are my top three:
• Thinking and learning as a whole team
• Making proper use of all available information
• Creating a call to action, a moment that engages the team.
Simple though these sound, we still struggle to make them happen sometimes.
Thinking and learning as a team
‘The learning organisation’ is a well-trodden concept. As Harvard Business School Professor David Garvin put it: “For learning to be more than a local affair, knowledge must be spread quickly and efficiently throughout the organisation”. Indeed, the Learning Organisation knits together people and systems to the extent that knowledge and insights become the fabric of the organisation or the team.
However, we all understand that is not how it usually operates. Ideas are generated and float around in the organisation. The ebb and flow of the business can just as equally wash insights up into a prominent place in the consciousness, or sink them without trace into a deep trench never to be seen again.
Ideas that achieve prominence have enough people around them to grab hold and give support – Garvin continues: “Enthusiastic borrowing replaces the ‘not invented here’ syndrome”. The challenge is that within our complex organisations, ideas are not necessarily easy for others to embrace.
We have all experienced the ‘not invented here syndrome’. Sometimes it is easier for others just to reject an idea out-of-hand rather than embrace it. Garvin quotes Milliken from Xerox, whose approach he calls ‘SIS’ or ‘steal ideas shamelessly’. In this way, ‘my idea’, becomes ‘our idea’. Cicero believed that: “to understand me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”
He knew that to understand an enemy you needed to get inside their psyche and experience their motivations, beliefs and drives.
Using all the information
Our world is not short of data. The expression ‘data deluge’ describes what we encounter daily. We create more data every two days than we did in total from the dawn of time till 2003. Data are growing exponentially, and doubling around every 10 months.
We truly are data-enriched but information impoverished. Throwing more pounds at the problem just exacerbates the problem and only serves to generate more metadata. The challenge is to find how to digest what we have, and bring it together in one space where the facts can interplay and generate new insights and information.
A call to action
Do you remember the last time you heard something that made you jump up and take action right away? It is hard to come up with a specific example right? These are moments when we are galvanised into action – like the galvanometer itself, we feel our needle twitch across the dial. It smacks against the casing.
Full scale deflection, we are fully energised – we simply must act! But these moments are rare, especially when they happen to a whole team at once, and spur it on in a single cause.
These moments are not intellectual ones, they are visceral. They are the sort of feeling you have in the middle of the night when you hear a noise downstairs, or when you are swimming in open water and you feel something brush your leg.
These are not the sort of feelings that arise from sending an email round or from a WebEx. They don’t follow a ‘deep dive’ into the data or an edict from senior management. They are though, exactly the sort of thing that you need to create if you want your team to follow a single course, especially if it looks in any way arduous or improbable of success.
A key part of achieving the win is in helping people to realise what it could be like to be overcome by the competition.
In most businesses today, there is so much happening, so many stimuli, that it is hard to separate the most important from the most trivial events. This is even truer as you move your big idea across a cross functional team, where so many other priorities can interfere with your own. You want the team to feel that same energy that you feel, you want them to know that success is not inevitable, you need them to realise how success could taste and to engage around an action plan.
We must find a way to bring our thinking and learning team inside the psyche of the competitor. To predict how they will react to things we might choose to do ourselves. We need to process the data we have into information and to focus the learning team around it. We have to create an irresistible sense of urgency.
Any launch preparation truly is a change process. If you can create a compelling vision and instil the motivation to move forward, the business will want to move along with you.
Once as brand leader, despite a major competitive threat, I found my organisation to be too complacent. Ours was the standard of care – the best, most highly engineered product. I didn’t feel though, that success was inevitable and wanted to create that sense of urgency.
“What am I most afraid of?” I asked myself and before I knew it, found I was drafting a launch press release… for my competitor. I wrote it as aggressively as I could. Every statement they would make – the claims we feared most, a loving quote about them from our favourite advocate, and the impact of this news on our share price.
I added an embargo time, and felt my gut wrench. Now to show it to someone else to see the effect it might have. So I forwarded it straight to my boss. Only a couple of corridors away, by the time I got there he was pacing around like a big cat, very fast and very agitated.
“Look at this!”
“I know – it was me.” I smiled.
“I know you sent it across.” He wasn’t laughing. He listed off all the things we needed.
“No!” this was scary – he didn’t get it, he thought it was real. I had to stop it. “I mean I wrote it – the press release.”
He stopped in mid-flow. “The release, I wrote it myself. They haven’t launched yet, the share price hasn’t dipped, our KOLs haven’t gone over…I made it all up.” I hung my head. His reaction surprised me.
“This is brilliant!” he said. “We have to get the team in.” The team stood silently on his unnecessarily plush carpet. Wondering what was coming next, the head of BI tried to catch my eye. “Look at this!” my Boss could almost have been RADA-trained. “What the hell are we going to do?”
The team stood there – ashen, speechless. The more confident exchanged glances.
“Well the bad news is…” he let it truly sink in, “…if we don’t get organised, this is how it will be…” he paused. “The good news is that they haven’t actually launched yet and we have six months to get it together.”
An audible sigh just beat the grim realisation of the mountain left to climb. Then everyone started coming up with ideas and actions and plans. We never looked back! So if we could bring the whole learning team together in an environment where all available data is present with a clear call to action, we might just get the result we need – enter the competitor room.
The competitor room used to be known as wargaming until that term became unpalatable in our current context, but that is effectively what it is. Strategic competitive scenario development workshop doesn’t have quite the same ring – we just call it competitoroom.
Pitch your competitors against each other as sub-teams with perfect (or as good as you can get) information and sufficient time to knock seven bells out of each other, and agree how they plan to eat your lunch as well.
Then play the game, inflicting strategic damage on each-others’ brands. The learning comes from the flow of play, and from each ‘company’ sharing how and why it has acted as it has. By spending sufficient time thinking about how you should react to a swathe of damaging competitor strategies, you can come up with a detailed understanding of whether competitors are likely to act in a certain way and what you would do about it if they did.
As most competitor rooms are played out over a 3-5 year horizon, this gives you the time to refine your plan and build the contingencies you need to avoid poor Cara’s fate. By the end of the session, which ideally needs at least a day and a half, you know the whole team is fully engaged and truly understands the issues at play.
So the competitor room seems to address at least the top three issues above. It brings the cross-functional team together in a stimulating environment and in a learning mood, and creates a vivid call to action that cannot be ignored. An unexpected bonus is a set of assumptions that not only form the backbone of the outputs and the plan, but have been pressure tested by the whole team and agreed up and down the line.
So when your boss asks you: “Whose assumptions are these?”…
Jonathan Dancer is managing partner at The MSI Consultancy, a Cello Health Business. Email: jdancer@msi.co.uk, or for further information visit www.msi.co.uk
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