What We Do
Know Your Competition
Build Winning Strategies
Know Your Competition
Build in-depth understanding of how and why your competitors act as they do and will respond to your future moves
Anticipate the Future
Build Winning Strategies
Know Your Competition
Anticipate future competitive scenarios and plan pre-emptives strategies
Build Winning Strategies
Build Winning Strategies
Build Winning Strategies
Insulate your branding, positioning, new products & other marketing initiatives for long term success
Who We Are
Stephanie Frei is founder and lead strategist at Solid Ground Strategy
She opened the practice after 25+ years in various strategy leadership roles at major Chicago ad agencies. Her experience spans branding, communications, context planning and advertising strategy through marketing and competitive strategy. The last is her passion and now her primary focus, believing competitive analysis is often overlooked and underappreciated within strategic planning.
Stephanie's career has exposed her to a wide variety of consumer goods and services industries. Working mostly with Fortune 500 companies, she has led competitive strategy initiatives in various consumer foods categories, pet foods, OTC drugs, home care, healthcare, fitness clubs, retail and insurance. She has led clients in each of these industries to better understand their competitive context and make more informed strategic decisions for the future.
Her approach is highly collaborative. She begins by developing a fresh, in-depth understanding of a client's competition via analysis of tracking information, analyst reports and qualitative interviews. She digs deep to understand what motivates and propels companies and thus makes them predictable. She then leads cross functional client teams to apply this knowledge to develop future scenarios and pre-emptive client solutions.
Stephanie brings both insightful competitive analysis and engaging war gaming facilitation skills to every client engagement. She is passionate, engaged, and results oriented. Clients are left with both an improved understanding of their competitive context as well as actionable strategic solutions.
Our Passion
At Solid Ground, we believe effective marketing solutions are born from a complete understanding of the problem to be solved and its future context.
While most marketers willingly invest to understand their customers (and to build meaningful offerings and communications to fulfill their needs), few give the same attention to knowing and anticipating their competition. This is short-sighted, as the future of their category and of their own initiatives, will be decided as much by competitive actions as by customer response.
They are working with only half of the puzzle!
Our Purpose
Solid Ground Strategy was created to provide the rest of the puzzle and enable clients to anticipate their competitors' future moves. We help brands and companies develop more effective, defensible and enduring marketing initiatives by digging deep to truly know and anticipate their competition. The result is brands, new products and other marketing initiatives that are not easily thwarted or copied and that often leapfrog the competition.
In other words, we use competitive intelligence to help anticipate the future and ensure your success.
What We Can Do For You
Improve Performance
Thorough competitive analysis can have a meaningful impact on many marketing situations and increase your chances of success. For example:
Insulate your marketing initiatives
Ensure your strategies are differentiated and craft plans that anticipate how the competition will respond.
- New product launches
- Entry into new markets
- Brand repositionings
- New claims, campaigns
- Move into new channels
Defend against competitive threats
Anticipate how your competition is likely to act in the future and drive changes in category dynamics.
- New category entrants
- Changes in competitor leadership
- Ownership changes
- Competitor innovation & claims
- Changes in regulations
Build new capabilities
Learn from others to elevate your own performance.
- Study best practices of companies that excel in a desired area of improvement (e.g. innovation, e-commerce)
- Benchmark your capabilities vs competitors to remain competitive
An Action-oriented Approach
For competitive strategy to have a meaningful impact, it must be translated to actionable, future looking insights and plans.
For this reason, Solid Ground Strategy offers a 3-step approach:
1) Understand
In-depth analysis of key competitors, including their capabilities, motivations and tendencies, that make them predictable.
Profiles are built from quantitative and qualitative learning that bring companies and brands to life and help anticipate their future moves.
2) Anticipate
Facilitated war gaming sessions leverage competitor insights to anticipate future scenarios and build appropriate client pre-emptive plans.
Various future scenarios and client options are explored.
3) Act
Pre-emptive, detailed and customized action plans are developed to thwart the most viable threats.
Actionable next steps, priorities and assignments are made.
Additional Benefits
The collaborative nature of our people and approach offer clients unexpected side benefits
- A new external focus and awareness
- In-depth grounding in the competition with a future perspective
- Cross functional knowledge sharing and team building
- An unbiased, third party perspective and credibility
Our Services
Strategic Analysis
Strategic Analysis
Strategic Analysis
In-depth analysis of companies and categories:
Competitors and category landscapes
Best practice benchmarking
Acquisition targets
Facilitation
Strategic Analysis
Strategic Analysis
War Gaming Sessions
Positioning Workshops
Consultancy
Strategic Analysis
Consultancy
Marketing Strategy
New products
Brand positioning
Context Planning
Competitive strategy training
A Few of Our Clients
