Menu
Close
.svg)
In the past few months, two different clients approached us with a familiar strategic circumstance: significant new competitors are advancing toward the market, and their marketing teams want a disciplined way to get ready. Not a light refresh or a quick messaging huddle -- real preparation. The kind that sharpens instincts, aligns teams, and surfaces vulnerabilities long before a competitor lands their first punch.
It felt like time to revisit a venerable approach many in our industry have used to great effect. Think John Wick cracking open the concrete floor to retrieve the weapons he once buried. Competitive simulation, sometimes in times past called war-gaming, may not involve sledgehammers, but when done right, it equips a team with exactly the strategic firepower they need.
And if there’s one truth this discipline has taught us over the years, it’s this: preparation isn’t just important -- it's the engine of the entire exercise.
A credible competitive simulation begins long before anyone steps into a workshop meeting space. It starts with a systematic CI audit: a structured, concurrent review of everything we know (and can reasonably infer) about the competitive landscape.
At ThinkGen, we typically engineer this audit as a multi-source blueprint that pulls together:
Core clinical information, trial data interpretations, expected labeling, early signals on sales-force structure and incentives, historical launch behaviors, and anything else a competitor is likely to bring into play. This becomes the raw material for constructing a defensible competitor profile.
Sell-side analysts from major investment banks, or websites like www.seekingalpha.com, often reveal insights or pressures that don’t show up in public disclosures. Their expectations about differentiation, adoptions curves, discounting risk, or potential product positioning strategies help us model not just what competitors can do, but what they may feel compelled to do.
These perspectives are essential to forming a competitor strategy that feels authentic rather than sanitized.
This is where ThinkGen’s roots in primary marketing research truly strengthen the simulation. We test a prototype of the future competitor -- TPP, clinical story, claims, perceived advantages and drawbacks -- in qualitative interviews among target customers. We dig into customer responses to identify the potential edge a new competitor might bring, and/or how they might shift the market to amplify attributes that aren't salient today.
Hearing physicians react freely gives the home team early intelligence:
This step alone often reshapes assumptions before the workshop even begins. And we would, as a matter of course, combine our own research with any previous primary research that has been conducted looking at marketplace evolution and the competitor specifically. This might include studies surrounding scientific meetings, ATU studies, or other research aimed to deciphering expected future behavior.
Collectively, these inputs form a coherent, engineered understanding of the competitive threat -- a foundation that makes every subsequent step far more impactful.
Only after the CI audit and pre-work does the simulation workshop begin. Here, we model the exercise in three phases:
Before anyone role-plays a competitor or brainstorms an attack plan, we clarify -- crisp and early -- the purpose, goals, scope, participants and success criteria. Our clients know exactly what they’re solving for and why. This phase builds the scaffold for a productive session.
This is where the fun, and the strategic rigor, comes alive.
Participants split into two teams:
Each team receives the results of the CI audit, customer insights, and the competitor blueprint we’ve assembled.
Then the real role-play begins.
The away team’s mission is to “become” the competitor -- Sun Tzu style. That means using every available insight to design a strategy and tactics deck that reflects how the competitor would realistically behave. Their job is not to caricature, exaggerate, or soften. Their job is to think like the rival. (Giving teams distinct jerseys or lighthearted judo-inspired team names does wonders to help them commit to the role.)
Meanwhile, the home team develops/evolves its own positioning, messaging, counter-arguments, and tactical game plan -- identifying new areas of differentiation and pressure-testing its current strategy under fire.
Our facilitation approach is not passive. ThinkGen plays an active role -- keeping participants focused, ensuring the energy stays high, and pushing teams to ground decisions in evidence, not wishful thinking.
And yes, we’ve found that infusing humor, urgency, and healthy rivalry makes the day substantially richer. Teams lean in because the stakes feel real.
This is where ThinkGen’s experience truly pays off. The raw workshop outputs -- messaging ideas, strategy boards, tactical plans -- are transformed into testable stimuli.
These become the materials for the next step: the dueling sales presentations.
In 1:1 interviews, two reps (carefully matched in skill level) scrimmage by delivering the home-team pitch and the away-team pitch to physicians. This part is crucial: the reps must be evenly matched so doctors evaluate content, not personality or polish.
As physicians react to and challenge these dueling presentations, each team iterates from behind the glass. Rebuttals are delivered. Messaging tightens. Objections sharpen. Credibility is tested in real time.
And yes, handing out playful awards at the end -- “Most Artful Counter-Strike,” “Best Surprise Comeback” -- adds some levity while reinforcing the competitive spirit that makes the exercise memorable.
A well-run competitive simulation yields two invaluable results:
Teams walk away with a grounded understanding of how the competitor is likely to position, message, and challenge the brand. This becomes a defensible envisionment of their go-to-market behavior.
The brand’s refined messaging and tactical plan is informed by direct customer feedback under competitive pressure -- something no internal meeting can replicate.
This combination gives commercial leaders the confidence of having rehearsed the battle before the opening bell rings. A saying often attributed to the U.S. Navy SEALS which is relevant to this type of exercise is, “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.”
Competitive simulation isn’t new. Historically, it something that my colleagues and I at ThinkGen have done many, many times. But in a market where stakes are higher, launches are tighter, and competitors are more sophisticated, it remains one of the most powerful and venerable tools a brand can utilize.
When approached with rigor, creativity, and just a little John Wick energy, it brings teams together, sharpens strategic instincts, and prepares brands for the reality of the fight ahead.
And at ThinkGen, we’re proud to help companies engineer these simulations end-to-end -- from CI audit to workshop facilitation to real-world testing -- so they walk into the future ready, confident, and unshaken.
