Strategic foresight for marketing and strategy teams
See the storm before it makes landfall.
A Competitive Horizon Scan watches the conditions forming offshore, competitors repositioning, entrants gathering, customers drifting, and tells you what is building and how close it is, every signal cited and dated. You see it in time to adjust positioning, messaging, and where you place your bets, early enough to dodge the storm or catch the opening before your competitors do.
Book a 30-minute scoping callNo pitch. We confirm fit and which questions matter most to you.
What you cannot see is what costs you
By the time a market shift shows up in your dashboards, it has already made landfall. But it was forming for weeks: the competitor quietly repositioning, the new entrant gathering strength, the substitute pulling your customers away. Most teams find out a quarter too late, from a number that already moved.
What you get
A six-lens landscape of your market. Every finding is cited, dated, and graded for how much weight it can bear, so your team can act on it with confidence.
- Where your category stands today: the state-of-play baseline
- Direct competitors: moves, launches, positioning shifts
- Substitutes: what buyers use instead of the category
- Emerging entrants: who is new and gaining ground
- Adjacent disruption: the category-jump threats forming at the edges
- Customer pain: the complaints and unmet needs moving right now
Every finding carries an honesty grade, so you always know how much weight it can bear:
Well-sourced. Act on it.
Directional. Treat as a lead, not a fact.
Not enough evidence to make the claim, so we tell you so. You get what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. That is the difference between intelligence and flattery.
It ships agent-ready too: clean, dated context chunks your own AI tools can read directly, with no slide deck to extract first.
How the engagement works
A delivered three-week project, not a black-box report. It follows the Double Diamond: open up to explore, then narrow to decide, twice.
Discover and Define
Short interviews with your stakeholders to map what good looks like to you: your aspirations, your fears, the decisions this needs to inform. I converge that into the precise questions the scan will answer.
Develop
I run the six-lens scan across public, dated, authoritative sources, and grade every finding before it ships.
Deliver
A synthesis of what matters, then a walkthrough where I take your team through the findings and we agree your next moves. You finish understanding it, not holding a report you have to decode alone.
Investment
A single scan, delivered with a walkthrough so your team understands it and knows the next moves.
Book a scoping callEverything in Bronze, plus a working session where we pressure-test the findings, choose your three highest-priority response moves, and leave with a 30-day action plan. Includes one 30-day refresh.
Book a scoping callDiscovery once, then a quarterly scan, working session, and monthly signal alerts. Continuous early warning, billed quarterly. The best value when market intelligence is an ongoing need, not a one-time question.
Book a scoping callFor context: a strategic-foresight engagement is typically priced from $20,000 to over $500,000, and a senior practitioner's day rate runs $7,000 to $10,000. A single Horizon Scan costs about one of those days, fully delivered, with every finding cited and graded. Building the same watch in-house means a competitive analyst at $120,000 to $200,000 a year fully loaded, plus the hiring, training, and keeping. Standing Watch gives you continuous early warning at a fraction of any of these, as a service you switch on rather than a role you have to fill.
Why Magma
- → Two decades at the intersection of marketing and enterprise architecture: the rare person who understands both the market signal and the systems that turn it into action.
- → Current architect-in-residence work on the agentic-marketing systems of a Fortune-100 financial-services company.
- → Founder of Serverless Toronto, a practitioner community run for eight-plus years, with a long public archive of teaching.
Your early warning system for what's coming.
A 30-minute call to confirm scope and see if this fits. If it does, your first scan begins within two to three weeks.
Book your scoping call