Strategic Marketing Workshops & Consulting
Drive Your Strategic Planning Process
TVG’s Strategic Workshops offer a unique, hands-on opportunity to focus on your specific business situation. The programs help you develop, evaluate or critique potential business strategies and tactics, pressure test current marketing efforts versus the competition and provide action-oriented deliverables on how to grow your business. TVG provides the objectivity and experience to facilitate these valuable forums of internal stakeholders to create consensus about forward direction.
Competitive Simulation Workshopssm
Competitive Simulation Workshopssm, our enhanced version of the War Gaming Methodology, are designed to help create “what if” scenarios to learn how and when to defend against possible new competitive threats, or to effectively compete with new or established products. Competitive Simulations can be executed internally by the extended brand team or externally with customers to gain the perspectives of target audiences. Likewise, they can focus narrowly on testing and revising alternative promotional messages, or focus on a relatively broader evaluation of a full range of strategic and tactical marketing options (often including a SWOT analysis).
Competitive Simulation Workshopssm are a valuable tool for internal marketplace analysis and when the balance of power among competitors is anticipated to change, such as:
- A new product is entering your market
- You are the new product and want to gain share against existing competitors
- There is a dramatic change in a competitor’s strategy
- Important new competitive data or studies have been released
- The FDA is focusing on safety for products in your treatment area
- When an in depth strategic market review is deemed necessary
Internal Competitive Simulation Workshops
The internal CS Workshop has been utilized for more than 20 years, and has been modified and adapted to serve a variety of marketing and marketing research situations. It helps you assess the core goals, strengths and weaknesses of your competitive set and identify possible threats and their level of importance. This workshop consistently provides detailed insights about how to think about products in a changing marketplace. An internal multi-disciplinary team is used for this exercise that might include Marketing, Sales, R&D, Regulatory, Medical Education, Marketing Research, etc.
External Competitive Simulation Workshops
External Competitive Simulations are most often used to strengthen the core message against a competitor. In this type of exercise two internal teams (one team represents your product and the other a competitive product) compete against each other to create a “best guess” message for their product. These messages are “executed” in a controlled environment to allow your team to evaluate the impact of the competitive response to your message and strategy. The results are refined marketing tactics to improve brand performance.
This technique may also be used to prepare Sales Representatives in highly competitive situations by addressing tactical concerns after the core selling message is finalized. It gives Reps a forum for testing various tactics for the handling of specific issues in interactive presentations with customers. In both cases, customers are brought into provide reactions, and discuss what they will do and why based on the presentations they have seen.
For more information on our Strategic Marketing Workshops contact Scott Lauder at 215-283-5451, slauder@tvg-inc.com.