Profile

Profile is an important part of understanding competitors.

Uses of the method

To understand competitive advantage and disadvantage
To understand rivals possible future strategies

Benefits

To anticipate and prepare for emerging change from watching competitive moves
To use the best of the rest to be ahead of all rivals

Disadvantages

Only gives a partial view of rivals moves
Rivals may be deceptive in their information releases

Steps to complete

Complete the template using as many sources for verification purposes

Annual report & accounts	Pricing / price lists	Meetings with suppliers
Press releases	Advertising campaigns	Trade shows
Newspaper articles	Promotions	Sales force meetings
Analysts reports	Tenders	Seminars / conferences
Regulatory reports	Patent applications	Recruiting ex-employees
Government reports	Presentations	Discussion with shared distributors

Be factual, don't guess! Use other competitive analysis tools here to speculate on future scenarios.
Capture your most exciting idea and biggest fear
Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization.
State alternative hypotheses drawn with different assumptions and judgments.
What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
- How might the future be different?
- How does A affect B?
- What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
- What are the likely outcomes?
- What and who will likely shape our future?
- Where could we be most affected by change?
- What might we do about it?
- What don't we know that we need to know?
- What should we do now, today?
- Why do we care?
- When should we aim to meet on this?
Develop next steps and determine if any further research required

Related/complementary tools

Scenario planning

Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.

Click the 'Invite tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input. You can whether or not you want anonymous responses. These can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.

Further reference

History
Technique developed by Shaping Tomorrow

Contact us
Even with all the advice and tools we have provided here starting a foresight project from scratch can be a daunting prospect to a beginner. Let us know if you need help with this method or want a group facilitation exercise or full project or program carrying out by us. We promise to leave behind more internal knowledgeable people who can expand your initiative for better organizational performance.

Are there other enhancements or new methods you would like to see here? Let us know and we will do our best to respond with a solution quickly.

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