Research & Consulting

Whether it's fast answers to simple questions or detailed analyses of complex scenarios, the Playmakers offer a spectrum of strategy management research and consulting services.

Playmaker Consultations™

On the Line, Online or On-Site

Standard-certified consultants work with you and your team to break down the moves and motives of friends, foes and fence-sitters, build action-and-reaction scenarios, and put you in control of marketplace discussions.

The individual types of Playmaker Consultations™ we offer:

Playmaker's On-Call™
Adaptive Positioning™
Reputation Management
Crisis Management

Playmaker Strategy Maps™

See the Strategy, Map the Game

Analytics companies get you the data. The Playmakers get you the strategy.

Introducing Playmaker Strategy Maps, a trademark service of The Playmaker's Standard. Developed and delivered by Standard-certified consultants on the patent-pending StrategyMapper™ webtool, our custom-commissioned diagrams show what's never been seen before—the actual plays of your marketplace. Not the tactics, but the moves and motives that underlie the execution the ever-present but always elusive influence strategies of your marketplace.

You'll see the patterns, sequences, trends and tendencies of collaborators and competitors in your marketplace. And you'll know the answers to questions like these:

Are we driving our issues? Or are we reacting to others?
How can we change the game? How can we slow or stop our rival?
What partners are helping us? Who's dropping the ball?
Are we being lured? Are they taking the bait?

Playmaker Strategy Maps offer rich depictions and scenario-based predictions of the influence strategies of your marketplace.

Play the what if game with our Depict/Predict feature. It's your go-to-market tool for predicting a competitor's next move and driving your agenda.
With StrategySignature see patterns, trends, tendencies and sequences of plays that are being run and by what player.

All maps are delivered online in PDF-printable format. Maps may be populated with up to 24 timeline columns.

Playmaker Wargames™

Simulate the Strategy, Play the Game

Wargaming has long been a best practice for boardroom and battlefield planning. But in the influence industries – i.e. marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, public affairs, lobbying, political campaigning – this was an untenable notion.

Why?

Because the battlefield had never been mapped. The game pieces had yet been discovered. And the irreducible components of influence – a.k.a., the moves that a player could make during a product launch or marketing campaign – were not yet defined. But that is now changed.

Playmaker Wargames allow you to:

Simulate and stress-test influence strategies for advancing initiatives and launching products.
Game-out prepared plays and platforms in support of announcements.

And answer questions such as:

What sequences and combinations of plays are best employed to develop, drive and legitimize.
What stakeholders will support your team? What plays will they run to help you?
What stakeholders are detractors. What plays will they run to hinder you?
How will you use detractors as foils, i.e., to alter/improve the positioning and perception of your brand and supporting solutions?
What best practices will guarantee success?

Just as an airplane goes through numerous test cycles – consisting of engineers, mechanics, air-traffic controllers, pilots and crew – to ensure a successful first flight, the same can now be said about product launches and influence-based campaigns.

Playmaker Wargames are held on-site or at a location of a client's choosing and last between one and three days. They bring together an organization's best minds and knit together the collective expertise of the various divisions and departments that support your initiative.

PIP Shots™ Plays in a Play

How Plays Work

Influence strategies are like layers of an onion. Some are wide and all-encompassing. Some are narrow are tied directly to tactics. We call these alpha and beta plays, respectively, stratagems that over-arch a grand scheme and stratagems that support it.

To illustrate these plays in a play, our Standard-certified consultants develop eye-popping illustrations of the plays of a speech, article, ad or blog. Using The Playmaker's Table and lexicon, Plays in a Play unravels the matrix of influence strategies that alter sentiment, set agendas, and win perception wars.

Influence Strategy Audit

Preparing the Playmaker

To determine the optimal offering of Playmaker services, Standard-certified consultants conduct an audit of a client's competitive readiness, collaborative capacity, organizational capability, resources and policies. These are questions we seek to answer:

What are your key competitive threats and opportunities?
How can we collaborate with like-minded players?
Where in the org chart is help needed most?
Where do you require training and support?
What is your ability to analyze and run plays?
What are the best formats and means for receiving Playmaker services?

Audits are performed through a series of approved telephone or in-person interviews of key managers and executives and a review of existing methods for tracking and analyzing movements in the client's marketplace.

New Media Measurement

Track and Control New Media

Social networks aren't just for socializing; they're for influencing. Blogs aren't just for reporting; they're for influencing too.

By their nature, platforms like Facebook and MySpace, and even microblogging services like Twitter, capitalize on organic channels of influence. Blogs are similar. Whatever their authority or ranking, most have an agenda and few are shy to express it.

In the exploding digital landscape, new media are natural vehicles for the newest generation of savvy playmakers. And they are natural forums to study and shape. To help you master and manage these new worlds of fresh ideas and fierce opinions, we offer three customizable services:

TwitterTracks is an ongoing updatable analysis of Twitter users and their hourly, even minute-by-minute, 140-character microblasts. This study aggregates tweets of target users, from NGOs to corporate competitors to customers and partners, all to reveal the dominant plays they're running--subtly, harshly or even unwittingly. Against these findings, Standard-certified consultants make rolling recommendations on the plays you can run and how to trend tweets to your competitive advantage.
FriendFluence is a specialized service that separates and surfaces material influence strategies of the many friends in the most popular social networks. We report the plays that are being employed by you, with you, around you, and on you. With this data, we recommend counterstrategies to redirect negative sentiments and seed on-point messages. After all, what are friends for?
BloggerPlays monitors target blogs and determines from their posts and comments the plays they run and the consequences for your team. Bloggers can be unassuming. Bloggers can be outrageous. But they all run plays. And since they're part of your industry they are prime candidates for analysis and management. Watching these blogs, moment-to-moment Standard-certified consultants report what ideas have been seeded, what assumptions have been challenged, which players have been recast, and what issues are being dodged. Without that, you're plans and agenda can be scuttled. With it, you're in control and moving your marketplace.

StrategyStream™

Supplying the Playmaker

To the untrained eye, Twitter may appear hyperbolic and indistinguishable. And to some extent, that's true. But within this cacophony of quips is a perfect means to initiate and direct your strategy. And because the medium allows you to say and imply things that you can't in more formal channels, Twitter – and other social media platforms too – is the perfect medium to round out your influence-based initiatives. Here are some of StrategyStream's benefits:

Run clever testing plays – such as the Ping play and Trial Balloon play – to assess initial ideas and gauge stakeholder feedback.
Employ freezing strategies – such as the Mirror play or Disco play – to protect your reputation, brand, product or initiative in times of crisis or sustained competitor attack.
Adjust the criteria and context of sentiments in your marketplace with framing plays – such as the Recast play or Screen play – to encourage favorable outcomes or suppress negative opinions.
Run diverting plays – such as the Red Herring play or Deflect play – to throw a competitor off its intended course of action or buy time to more thoughtfully address an important issue.
Run luring plays – such as the Bait play and Challenge play – to mobilize constituencies and incite rivals.
Run pressing plays – from the matter-of-fact-Fiat play to the audacious Peacock play – to establish or assert a marketplace position.

StrategyStream is supplied by certified consultant at The Playmaker's Standard and is for companies large and small. The pace, tone and tempo of inputs is customizable by the client and can be scaled up or down for product launches, crisis management and brand building exercises.