“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” – General Eric Shinseki

Just like our earlier article on ‘pre-mortems’, this tool is derived from a military concept to find the gaps and uncontested biases in tactical planning, the group is split down the middle into two.

The red team represents all the uncontrollable factors, that is the competitors, the market and the customer.

The blue team represents the brand, an outside invigilator (preferably someone from the leadership team) is appointed, and a couple of people to take notes (there will be a lot of useful work coming out of this!).

The scenario plays out in real time.

Blue team goes first and describes its marketing campaign to grow its market share. It should outline a timeframe for the campaign, cost, channels and how much is in the contingency budget.

Red team describe how they’d seek to undermine it through real scenarios (i.e., it can’t make up a highly unlikely event just to make Blue team’s job extra difficult), how they’d respond and what they’d do to limit its success and describe any circumstances that might happen that limits the utility of the blue team’s marketing campaign.

With only 5 minutes to design their response (to represent the shortened responding time of real life), Blue Team must explain what action they’d take, how much it would cost and how long it’d take to deliver.

The invigilator has power to slightly adapt the responses of either team to increase or decrease the effectiveness of it, if they feel the situation is unlikely to play out in real life).

If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for growing awareness of your brand or campaign, try this short exercise and see what you get. The address pressure of ideating in a room under time constraints with your team is a really useful strategy to clear blocks – as long as you al agree to remain friends at the end of it!

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