26 June, 2013

The Conference Board Business Scenario Program (BSP) helps senior-level executives map turbulent business futures in the medium term. By testing corporate strategies across a range of scenarios, including those exclusive to your organization’s business environment, you’ll identify underlying drivers of change and the uncertainty that comes with them.

This innovative one-day program will assess how global demand shifts and changes in consumption patterns will develop over the medium and long term as the economic center of gravity in the world is changing, and show how scenario planning works by:

• Probing the underlying shifts in global demand and consumption in the long term
• Assessing critical uncertainties in the medium-term
• Developing a set of scenarios to capture different futures
• Understanding implications and potential impact of each scenario, and required action in the immediate term

For Conference Agenda, click here.

Key questions

• What are the estimates of total global demand in the future?
• How big is the emerging market compared to mature markets?
• How will consumption evolve over time?
• What are the biggest market segments within each of these markets?
• What are key drivers that shape these markets?
• What are key bottlenecks that could shape the development of these markets?
• What types of anticipatory strategic responses can firms begin to shape now?

Key learning

• Explore one of the key game changers in today’s business world—global demands shifts
• Gain critical insights into shifts in some key consumption patterns
• Better understand the future by going beyond forecasts based on extrapolating the past
• Keeping inherent and irreducible uncertainty alive in the planning process
• Combining analytic rigor, entrepreneurial creativity, and strategic judgment
• Obtain insight into how to use scenarios for developing strategic action

Benefits of attending

• Explore the big picture of changing global center of gravity and global demand shifts
• Learn from executives of peer companies on how to strategize around global demand
• Get inputs to enhance the strategic dialogue among senior management

Who should attend?

Executives involved in managing a firm’s global marketing, competitive intelligence, corporate strategists, strategic planners, and chief economists.

Focusing on Major Demand Shifts in the Global Economy

The global center of gravity of economic activity is moving east- and southward and the size of global consumer markets will double in size the next decade. Key driving forces are economic growth, demographics and rising incomes.

According to The Demand Institute, an organization that focuses on understanding these changes, and which is jointly operated by The Conference Board and Nielsen, the preferences and patterns of consumption of hundreds of millions of people entering the middle class are having a dramatic impact on the global competitive landscape. How do companies prepare themselves for rapid and sudden increases in global and shifting consumption patterns?

At the same, if the new entrants to the middle class adopt similar consumption patterns as their Western counterparts, it may create serious sustainability challenges which can only be tackled by ongoing technological change and innovation and newly designed products and services. What major innovations in the consumer market space may emerge, and what are the risks of them not reaching the market in time?

Capturing and Exploring Key Uncertainties in the Medium-term

To tackle those and related questions this workshop will focus on analyzing global demand shifts, combined with the use of scenario planning to explore the inherent uncertainties in assessing the change in consumer markets over the next decade.

• The program will begin with setting the stage through The Conference Board’s global economic and business outlook for the next decade, centered on shifts in global centers of activity.
• Next we will review key research insights on the measurement of global consumer demand, analyze the key shifts in that demand, and identify the biggest.
• We will assess key uncertainties and use them to develop a set of three to four starter scenarios of global consumer demand development.
• We will further explore the starter scenarios, focused on a particular Demand Shift, and trace their implications and map their impact.

For Conference Agenda, click here.

For speaking and sponsorship opportunities, please contact Michael Fitton at michael.fitton@conferenceboard.org.