A war game done well produces something that no other CI deliverable can: a room full of senior leaders who have spent an entire day thinking like their competitors. Not reading about them. Not reviewing dashboards about them. Actually inhabiting their strategy, arguing for their positioning, and discovering — from the inside — where their own assumptions break down.
That's why competitive simulations are the highest-impact activity a CI function can run. They don't just produce intelligence. They change how an organization thinks about competition.
A war game is an interactive meeting in which participants role-play their competitors to simulate future competitive environments — particularly when the competitive environment is undergoing change: a new data release, a new market entry, an annual brand planning cycle, a pending loss of exclusivity. The goal is straightforward: challenge beliefs and assumptions about the market, identify risks that competitors might pose or opportunities they might create, understand the implications for your own strategy, and develop action plans to defend against threats or capitalize on openings.
I've run competitive simulations across dozens of therapeutic areas and competitive situations. The ones that change strategy — not just confirm it — share specific characteristics. This guide walks through all of them: the five phases, the three task types, the pre-read design, the facilitation approach, and the follow-through that determines whether the exercise was worth the investment.
For the broader CI methodology that war games build upon, see What Is Competitive Intelligence? The Complete Guide.
Brand planning is not something that can be done in a vacuum. The marketplace is continually evolving, and operational plans must be flexible enough to adapt to the environment. War games can be undertaken at any point along the product lifecycle to prepare a brand to affect or defend against change.
They're particularly useful when the competitive environment is experiencing — or set to experience — a shift:
The common thread: war games are most valuable when the competitive picture is about to change and the organization needs to think beyond its current assumptions.
But they're not a one-time exercise. The most sophisticated CI programs run competitive simulations as a recurring element of strategy development — not just when a crisis forces it. The organizations that build war games into their annual brand planning process are systematically better prepared for competitive events than those that only run them reactively.
For competitive threat assessment frameworks that feed into war game preparation, and how war games fit into broader pharma launch readiness, see those dedicated guides.
Running a competitive simulation is a structured process, not an improvised workshop. The methodology breaks into five phases, each of which determines the quality of what follows.
Collect and analyze relevant secondary research. Conduct primary research where necessary to feed additional viewpoints into the thinking. This phase establishes the factual foundation — clinical data, commercial intelligence, regulatory timelines, financial analysis, KOL perspectives — for every competitor team in the simulation.
The scope depends on the competitive situation. For a pre-launch war game in oncology, you might need comprehensive intelligence on five competitor compounds across three mechanisms of action, including clinical trial designs, primary and secondary endpoints, interim data readouts, expected filing timelines, regulatory interactions, commercial capabilities of the sponsoring companies, and KOL sentiment. That's weeks of research, not days.
This is also where you draw on internal knowledge. Here's something that always comes up in war games: 50% of all your CI needs can be found within your own company — you just don't know where it is. The field force has heard things. Medical affairs has relationships with investigators. Market access has insights from payer conversations. The war game preparation process should be designed to surface all of this before the workshop, not discover it during.
Develop briefing packs — the pre-read — that will inform and guide all participants to ensure that the workshop is as productive and efficient as possible. The pre-read is the foundation of an effective war game. A weak pre-read produces a weak simulation.
I'll cover the pre-read design in detail below, because it's the single most underestimated element of the process. Organizations that invest heavily in the workshop itself but shortchange the pre-read consistently get worse outcomes than those that do the reverse.
Design and tailor a custom process to meet the team's exact requirements. This isn't a template exercise — the design must account for the specific competitive situation, the strategic questions at stake, and the composition of participants.
Critical design variables include:
Facilitate an efficient, productive open-environment meeting with cross-functional representation. This is the war game itself — the day (or two) where participants actually step into competitor roles, develop competitor strategies, pressure-test their own positions, and build action plans.
I'll cover facilitation in detail below — the specific approaches that separate productive war games from expensive group discussions.
Deliver findings and proceedings from the project in an insightful and concise manner, capturing next steps and action items. The final report should include:
The report is not the end of the process. It's the beginning of the execution phase. War games are not tick-box exercises — they are a critical step in developing and refining competitive strategy. Without committed follow-up, the entire investment is wasted.
Typically, three types of task exist in a war game, and the design determines how they're sequenced and weighted:
Teams role-play competitors. Each team gets into the mindset of a specific competitor and develops that competitor's strategy and tactics as if they were running that company.
The goals of the simulation round:
This is the distinctive element that separates war games from every other strategic exercise. It forces participants to abandon their own perspective and genuinely advocate for a competitor's position. When a a top-10 pharma company brand director spends three hours arguing passionately for why a major pharma company's product is superior — and has to back it up with evidence — something shifts in how that director understands the competitive threat.
After developing competitor strategies, the own-brand team challenges their strategy against those competitor moves. This is where the simulation becomes directly actionable:
Often, the most valuable moment in a war game comes in a second round of competitive simulation: after the own team has refined their strategy, the competitor teams respond. This action-reaction cycle reveals which strategic positions are robust and which collapse under competitive pressure.
Concrete action items from the insights generated. This is where a war game earns its investment:
The action planning phase is the most frequently shortchanged. Facilitators let the competitive simulation and pressure-testing run long because they're engaging — and then squeeze action planning into the last 90 minutes. That's a mistake. If participants leave without concrete, assigned, time-bound action items, the war game was an intellectual exercise, not a strategic one.
The purpose of the briefing pack is to present information that can provide a common foundation for workshop participants and help each participant effectively role-play the competitor company they've been assigned.
Two critical guidelines:
The pre-read WILL contain data relevant to facilitating accomplishment of the workshop tasks and achieving workshop goals. It's a curated intelligence product, not a data dump.
The pre-read WILL NOT be a comprehensive compilation of all information known about a particular competitor. An overly verbose, complicated pre-read won't be read by participants. And an unread pre-read defeats its purpose entirely.
The contents of each pre-read will be tailored to the specific war game design, but typically include:
Market overview. High-level view of the competitive landscape — who's playing, what stage they're at, what the market structure looks like.
Competitor company profile. For each competitor being role-played: commercial strength in the relevant therapeutic area, portfolio and pipeline analysis, corporate and franchise-level SWOT.
Product-specific information. For each relevant competitor product: clinical trial overview and key anticipated data, marketing messages (or expected messages based on ongoing trials), KOL perceptions of efficacy, safety, and utility, product profile or target product profile, relevant competitive timeline, product-level SWOT.
Strategic context. The competitor's stated vision, core strategy, and any signals about how they're thinking about the indication — earnings call language, investor presentation positioning, executive commentary.
The pre-read should be distributed 2–3 weeks before the workshop. Participants need time to absorb it, form initial hypotheses, and come prepared to engage immediately rather than spending the first two hours of the workshop reading material they should have reviewed in advance.
The format matters: it should be a highly synthesized, graphical presentation of relevant information. Dense paragraphs of text don't get read. Clear visuals, concise summaries, and structured profiles do.
This is where competitive simulations succeed or fail. The quality of the role-play determines the quality of the insights.
There's an analogy I use from ocean racing that maps well onto brand management. Ocean racing is one of the most technically challenging, strategic, and competitive sports, with many analogs to how brands compete. Teams compete to win with their boats — those are the brands. Core boat design is R&D. Route planning and strategy is the global brand team. Sailing is the local brand teams. Boat improvement and innovation is lifecycle management. Evolving race rules are regulations. Weather conditions are payer attitudes. Local currents and waves are stakeholder behaviors.
Understanding a competitor's strengths and weaknesses is critical to developing effective strategy — but it's not enough. Some competitors may have significantly different boat design. Some may seemingly be able to control the elements. But understanding how competitors will sail their boats, what routes they might take, how they will look to challenge you — that's essential. Some companies have a completely different driving style. Spending time in your competitor's shoes helps crystallize key threats and identify opportunities that no amount of secondary analysis would reveal.
Effective role-play requires several things from participants:
Deep competitor knowledge. This is what the pre-read provides. Participants must understand not just the competitor's product data, but the competitor's organizational culture, strategic priorities, financial constraints, and decision-making patterns. A generics company approaches a market completely differently from an innovator. A company with a single product in the indication makes different decisions than one managing a franchise of five compounds.
Willingness to advocate for the competitor's position. This is the hardest part for most participants. The natural instinct is to dismiss the competitor's strategy, find weaknesses, and reassure yourself that your product is better. That defeats the purpose. In a war game, you play to win as the competitor. You make the strongest possible case for their product, their positioning, their commercial approach. The discomfort that creates is the point.
Competitive spirit and creativity. A war game isn't a reading exercise. It's a simulation. Participants need to be creative about how the competitor might move — thinking about market shaping, KOL engagement, messaging strategies, pricing tactics, and field force deployment that the competitor hasn't publicly announced but could plausibly execute.
The right attitude. For a war game to be successful, participants need competitive spirit, enthusiasm, openness, and creativity. They need to take competitors seriously, not dismiss their strategy. A team that treats the competitive simulation as a formality will produce nothing useful.
Developing a successful, innovative, and complete strategy requires the insights and involvement of multiple functions. In ocean racing, a successful team relies on tactical directors, sailors at bow, middle, and stern, meteorologists, oceanographers, boat builders, and support teams. In pharma, the equivalent is the global brand team, local sales, marketing, and medical, market access, business intelligence, R&D and clinical, and legal and regulatory. A war game with only commercial representatives produces a commercial view of competition. A war game with cross-functional representation produces a comprehensive view — and that's where the breakthroughs come.
Good facilitation is the difference between a productive war game and an expensive group discussion. Several principles:
Prepare the facilitation team, not just the participants. In the week before the workshop, hold a facilitator discussion to level-set expectations. Cover: the schedule and roles, facilitation approaches for each session (consistency across sessions matters), any special approaches (e.g., role-playing the CEO of a competitor), participant review (who will challenge, who will need to be motivated), workshop deliverables, the scenarios and their related differentiators, topics that are out of bounds, and recording templates.
Guide but don't lead. The facilitator's role is to keep the simulation on track, ensure all voices are heard, manage time rigorously, and push teams to be specific. It's not to provide answers or steer the group toward a predetermined conclusion. The best facilitation happens when the facilitator is invisible — the teams are doing the work.
Ensure cross-functional participation. The team composition should include commercial, medical, market access, regulatory, and CI representation. Single-function teams produce single-perspective insights. Cross-functional teams produce the kind of multi-dimensional competitive picture that actually informs strategy.
Build in uncertainty. Competitive situations involve genuine unknowns. Build uncertainty ranges into scenario assumptions rather than forcing single-point estimates. What if the competitor's Phase III data is strong? What if it's moderate? What if there's a safety signal? Each scenario produces different strategic implications, and the war game should explore that range.
Manage the most common pitfalls:
Drive toward specifics. "We should monitor this more closely" is not an action item. "Maria will commission a primary research study on competitor pricing strategy in the EU5 by March 15, with results presented at the Q2 brand planning meeting" is an action item. The facilitator's job is to push the group from vague intentions to specific commitments.
I'll give you a real example of how this works in practice. In the antihypertensives space, a one-day war game was designed to explore competitive scenarios around a major pharma company's Azilsartan, develop mitigation plans, and prioritize actions for the defending a top-10 pharma company portfolio.
Task 1: a major pharma company Role-Play. The team split into two groups, each focused on a different competitive scenario. Each group explored the a major pharma company mindset and capabilities — their commercial strengths in cardiovascular, their strategic priorities, their financial position. They developed a benefits ladder for Azilsartan, crafted core positioning statements, and explored key tactics and actions, both with and without commercial partners. The exercise forced participants to articulate exactly how a major pharma company would sell against the a top-10 pharma company portfolio — which messages, which data, which KOLs, which channels.
Task 2: a top-10 pharma company Strategy and Tactics. Again split into two groups, each focused on a different scenario. Each team articulated the specific threat to the a top-10 pharma company portfolio — Rasilez and valsartan — presented by the competitive scenario. They developed key messages and objection handlers: what do you say when a physician asks why they should stay on your product when the competitor is claiming superior blood pressure reduction? They developed initial action plans for each competitive scenario.
Task 3: Prioritization. The full group reconvened. The base case plan was agreed and next steps aligned. The group considered priorities across three categories: market shaping activities (what to do now to preempt the competitive threat), CI monitoring requirements (what to watch for and how to know if the competitor's launch is tracking toward the base case or an alternative scenario), and contingency planning (what to do if the competitive situation unfolds differently than expected).
The output was concrete: specific action items with owners, timelines, and success criteria. Not "think about competitive positioning" — but "develop counter-detailing materials for the field force addressing Azilsartan's blood pressure reduction claims, with clinical evidence from [specific trial], ready for field deployment by [specific date]."
That's what a good war game produces. Not awareness. Action.
After running dozens of competitive simulations, the success factors are consistent:
The right team. Senior leadership must participate — not delegate to their direct reports. War games lose their strategic value when the people who actually make decisions aren't in the room. This isn't a working-level exercise. It's a leadership exercise.
The right insights. Strong intelligence is needed to ensure business decisions are built from strong foundations. Weather reports and forecasts, insights into local currents and potential hazards, competitor boat design — the metaphor holds. The pre-read must be excellent. Weak intelligence in, weak strategy out.
Getting into the competitor's shoes. The role-play has to be genuine. Participants must be willing to advocate for the competitor, not just analyze them.
Considering the future. War games that focus entirely on the current competitive situation miss the point. The value is in anticipating how the environment will change and preparing for multiple scenarios.
Recognizing uncertainty. No competitive situation is certain. Good war games build uncertainty ranges into their scenarios and develop contingency plans for alternative outcomes.
Having the right attitude. Competitive spirit, enthusiasm, openness, creativity — without these, the simulation is mechanical and the outputs are predictable.
Turning theory into action. Committing to key decisions, identifying and following up on key uncertainties, developing next steps with committed timelines and assigned ownership — these are essential to success.
And critically: sustaining the effort after the war game ends. Successfully anticipating competitor tactics and blunting an initial launch is a critical success factor. But winning the first battle, while good for morale, is only the first step to sustained success. Effective long-term strategy requires proactive actions today, continued tracking of competitor action and reaction, rapid reactive strategy when needed, and an unrelenting focus on meeting customer needs. This cannot be achieved on autopilot after an initial success.
War games are not one-and-done events. They're part of a continuous competitive readiness discipline. The organizations that treat them as annual rituals get annual insights. The ones that integrate them into ongoing strategy development get sustained competitive advantage.
While this guide focuses primarily on pharma competitive simulations — where I have the deepest experience — the methodology applies across industries. The principles are universal: role-play forces empathy with the competitor's position, cross-functional teams produce richer insights, and action planning determines whether the exercise changes anything.
For technology companies, war games might simulate a competitor's product launch, pricing strategy, or platform expansion. For financial services, they might model a competitor's response to regulatory changes or market entry into a new geography. For consumer goods, they might explore retail strategy, brand positioning, or supply chain disruptions.
The adaptation is in the specifics — the data in the pre-read, the competitive dynamics being simulated, the decisions the organization needs to make. The structure — information gathering, pre-read preparation, workshop design, facilitation, reporting and follow-up — remains the same.
For CI teams in smaller organizations without dedicated war game budgets, scaled-down versions can still deliver value. A half-day session with the leadership team, focused on two or three key competitors and one specific strategic question, produces more actionable intelligence than no simulation at all. The pre-read can be lighter, the facilitation less formal, but the core principle — forcing participants to think as their competitors — works at any scale.
War games and scenario planning are complementary but distinct methodologies. Understanding the difference matters for choosing the right tool.
War games involve role-play. Participants take on the identity of specific competitors and develop strategies from that competitor's perspective. The output is a realistic assessment of how competitors might act and react. War games are grounded in specific competitor intelligence and produce concrete, near-term action plans.
Scenario planning involves building alternate futures. Participants develop multiple plausible scenarios based on key uncertainties — not specific competitor moves, but broader market and environmental changes. The output is a set of strategic options that are robust across multiple possible futures. Scenario planning is broader, more speculative, and produces longer-term strategic flexibility.
The most sophisticated CI programs use both. War games to pressure-test near-term strategy against known competitors. Scenario planning to prepare for structural changes that no competitor controls. Together, they create a competitive readiness posture that handles both the predictable and the unexpected.
For competitive intelligence teams building toward Phase III and launch, the CI investment typically escalates to include both: competitive simulations to test launch strategy against known competitors, and scenario planning to prepare for different data outcomes, regulatory decisions, and market access environments. At that stage, the investment ranges from $300K to $1M or more, with dedicated FTE supporting the competitive readiness program — a reflection of how much is at stake when billions of dollars in revenue depend on getting the competitive response right.
A competitive war game is an interactive workshop in which participants role-play their competitors to simulate future competitive environments. Teams develop competitor strategies, pressure-test their own positioning against those strategies, and build action plans to address the most significant threats and opportunities. It's the most powerful CI deliverable because it forces an organization to think from the competitor's perspective — revealing blind spots and assumptions that no amount of secondary analysis would uncover.
The workshop itself typically runs one to two days. But the full process — from initial intelligence gathering through pre-read development, workshop design, facilitation, and final report — takes four to six weeks. Most of that time is in Phase 1 (information gathering) and Phase 2 (material preparation). Compressing the preparation to save time invariably reduces the quality of the simulation.
Senior cross-functional leadership. The war game must include people who actually make strategic decisions — not just the people who prepare the analysis. A good participant mix includes global brand team leadership, local sales and marketing, medical affairs, market access, regulatory, R&D or clinical development, and CI. The diversity of perspectives is what makes the simulation valuable. A single-function team produces single-dimension insights.
As a standalone activity, a competitive simulation typically costs between $50K–$150K when externally facilitated, depending on the scope of intelligence gathering, the number of competitors being simulated, and the complexity of the market. Within a broader CI program, war games are part of the Phase III and launch investment tier: $300K–$1M+ with 0.3–1 FTE dedicated to competitive readiness. The cost is trivial relative to what's at stake — a launch decision informed by a competitive simulation versus one based on internal assumptions alone.
War games involve role-play — participants assume competitor identities and develop strategies from the competitor's perspective. Scenario planning builds alternate futures based on key uncertainties without assigning competitor roles. War games produce concrete, near-term action plans grounded in competitor intelligence. Scenario planning produces longer-term strategic flexibility across multiple possible futures. The best CI programs use both.
Yes. The methodology scales. A biotech with a 15-person leadership team can run a half-day simulation focused on two key competitors and one critical strategic question. The pre-read is lighter, the facilitation less formal, but the core principle — forcing participants to think as their competitors — works regardless of organizational size. What matters is having adequate competitive intelligence to make the role-play realistic, and having the right people in the room to make the outputs actionable. The biggest war game budgets don't always produce the best war games.
The most important phase. Action items must be assigned to specific owners with specific timelines and monitored through regular follow-up. The ranked list of opportunities and threats should feed directly into brand planning. CI monitoring plans should be updated to track the competitive indicators identified during the simulation. Contingency plans should be documented and reviewed when trigger events occur. Without committed follow-up, the war game was an expensive intellectual exercise. With it, it's a strategic advantage that compounds with each iteration.
Salvador Carlucci is the founder of the Atacana Group and has spent over two decades building competitive intelligence functions for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies worldwide. He is co-author of the seminal articles on CI in biotech published in Nature Biotechnology.
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