Strategies & Gameplays
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All Strategies & Gameplays A-Z
📄️ Alliances
Formal partnerships or consortia formed to pursue shared goals.
📄️ Ambush
Reactively undermining a specific competitor's progress or negating their advantage with a surprise strategic maneuver.
📄️ Artificial Competition
Creating the illusion of competition by establishing or funding a secondary entity that competes with your own offerings.
📄️ Brand and Marketing
Using traditional marketing and brand positioning to shape user perception.
📄️ Bundling
Combining products or changes together so that a less desirable item is packaged with a desirable one, encouraging adoption of the whole package.
📄️ Buyer-Supplier Power
Strategically managing the power dynamics between buyers and suppliers as a market evolves to gain a competitive advantage.
📄️ Center of Gravity
Building a focal point of talent, expertise, or activity that attracts the best resources and shapes the direction of an industry or ecosystem.
📄️ Channel Conflict and Disintermediation
A strategy of deliberately creating tension between distribution channels to gain control, reshape value flows, and own the customer relationship.
📄️ Circling and Probing
Circling and Probing isn't explicitly mentioned in Wardley's On 61 differnt forms of gameplay.
📄️ Co-creation
A strategy of actively involving customers or users in the product development process to create more valuable and user-centric solutions.
📄️ Co-opting
A strategy of adopting or mimicking a competitor's features, standards, or messaging to neutralize their advantage and attract their users.
📄️ Confusion of Choice
Overwhelming customers with too many options or complex choices so that making a rational decision becomes difficult.
📄️ Cooperation
Working with others, even competitors, to achieve a goal.
📄️ Creating Artificial Needs
Generating demand by inventing or amplifying a need that did not previously exist.
📄️ Creating Constraints
Purposefully introduce new bottlenecks to constrain competitors by shaping market, legal, or technical environments.
📄️ Defensive Regulation
A defensive strategy where an incumbent company uses government regulation and lobbying to create barriers to entry and hinder competitors.
📄️ Designed to Fail
Intentionally launching flawed initiatives to occupy, fragment, or poison a market before it can pose a threat.
📄️ Differentiation
Creating a unique value proposition by focusing on unmet user needs in less-evolved market spaces.
📄️ Directed Investment
Making a targeted, venture-capital-style investment in a future change or emerging area to outpace rivals and seize first-mover advantage.
📄️ Education
Educating the market or users to overcome their inertia to change by informing them of benefits or risks.
📄️ Embrace and Extend
A strategy to gain market dominance by first adopting a widely used standard, then adding proprietary extensions to create a lock-in effect.
📄️ Experimentation
Rapidly testing ideas through hackdays, specialist groups and skunkworks to uncover and exploit opportunities.
📄️ Exploiting Existing Constraint
Amplify an existing bottleneck to hinder competitors by increasing demand or restricting supply to stress their capacity.
🗃️ Exploiting Network Effects
6 items
📄️ Fast Follower
Leveraging the mistakes and groundwork of pioneers to enter markets at the optimal time with improved execution.
📄️ Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
A classic tactic of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt to slow adoption of a competitor's innovation or to dissuade customers from switching.
📄️ First Mover
Establishing a dominant position by industrialising or standardising a component before others.
📄️ Fool's Mate
A swift, often uncounterable strategic move that exploits a poorly understood or defended component in an opponent's value chain to cause cascading failure or commoditization.
📄️ Fragmentation
Splintering a rival's market to erode their stronghold.
📄️ Harvesting
Scaling innovation by observing a platform's ecosystem, identifying successful third-party offerings, and then acquiring, replicating, or integrating them.
📄️ Industrial Policy
Aligning with or influencing government investment and policy to accelerate strategic industry evolution.
📄️ Innovate, Leverage, Commoditize (ILC)
A cyclical strategy of using an ecosystem as a sensing engine to guide innovation and maintain market leadership.
📄️ Insertion
Embedding agents or narratives to covertly steer competitors into suboptimal strategic decisions.
📄️ Land Grab
Positioning early in an emerging market to capture strategic ground and shape future competitive dynamics.
📄️ Last Man Standing
A strategy of outlasting competitors in a commoditizing market to capture remaining market share.
📄️ Licensing
Using legal terms to restrict competitors and lock in an ecosystem.
📄️ Limitation of Competition
Structurally reducing or preventing competitive pressure through regulatory, legal, or environmental barriers.
📄️ Lobbying
Influencing government or regulatory bodies to shape the environment in your favour, often as a precursor to regulation or limitation of competition.
📄️ Managing Inertia
A defensive strategy focused on proactively identifying and overcoming an organization's internal resistance to change to enable adaptation and agility.
📄️ Market Enablement
Actively encouraging the growth of a competitive market around a component or service to accelerate its evolution and adoption.
📄️ Misdirection
Deliberately sending false or misleading signals to competitors to obscure your true intentions.
📄️ Open Approaches
Making something open—source, standards, data, or APIs—to accelerate adoption, drive commoditisation, and enable ecosystem growth.
📄️ Patents & Intellectual Property Rights
Use patents and other IP rights to legally fence competitors and slow their technological progress.
📄️ Pig in a Poke
Disguising toxic assets as valuable to offload risk before their true nature emerges.
📄️ Platform Envelopment
A platform provider expands its market influence by integrating or bundling functionality of another platform, or by directly competing with its own users.
📄️ Playing Both Sides
Profiting from or hedging by engaging with two opposing sides in a market or standards war, so that whichever side wins, you benefit.
📄️ Press Release Process
Using Amazon's "working backwards" method to ensure clarity of vision and market fit.
📄️ Pricing Policy
Using pricing as a strategic tool to manipulate demand, shape markets, and gain competitive advantage.
📄️ Procrastination
A defensive strategy of deliberately waiting for competitors to bear the costs and risks of developing a new market or technology before entering.
📄️ Raising Barriers to Entry
A defensive strategy of increasing the complexity and scope of a product or service to make it more difficult for new competitors to enter the market.
📄️ Refactoring
Internally reorganizing and repurposing components of a legacy system to salvage value or reduce toxicity. Refactoring means breaking the old asset into parts, reassigning useful parts to new roles, and eliminating the rest. Akin to code refactoring in software, but applied to business assets.
📄️ Reinforcing Competitor Inertia
Exploiting a competitor's reluctance or inability to change.
📄️ Restriction of Movement
Limiting a rival's ability to maneuver or adapt.
📄️ Sapping
Attacking a competitor on multiple fronts simultaneously to weaken their capacity to respond.
📄️ Signal Distortion
Manipulating market signals to mislead competitors and influence their strategic decisions.
📄️ Standards Game
Driving adoption of your technology or process until it becomes the dominant standard, locking in customers and constraining competitors.
📄️ Strategic Divestment and Disposal of Liability
Strategically restructuring by separating or selling off business units, assets, or divisions to unlock value, enhance focus, or dispose of liabilities.
📄️ Sweat & Dump
Outsource operation of a legacy asset to a third party, extract remaining value, and exit before the cost curve turns against you.
📄️ Talent Raid
Removing or absorbing key talent from a rival organisation.
📄️ Tech Drops
Surprising competitors with significant and unexpected technological advances to seize initiative and reshape the market.
📄️ Threat Acquisition
A defensive strategy where a company acquires a potential competitor to neutralize a threat and maintain market position.
📄️ Tower and Moat
Establishing a dominant position in a future market (the Tower) and building defensive barriers (the Moat) to prevent competition.
📄️ Two-Sided Markets
Creating a platform that brings together two distinct groups of users (e.g., buyers and sellers) to create value through network effects.
📄️ Undermining Barriers to Entry
An offensive strategy focused on identifying and dismantling a key barrier that protects an incumbent, thereby opening the market to new competition.
📄️ Value Chain Disaggregation and Re-aggregation
Strategically breaking down and recombining value chain components to unlock new operating models and market opportunities.
📄️ Weak Signal (Horizon)
Detecting subtle economic, technological, and behavioural patterns to anticipate market shifts before they become obvious.