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.
No 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.
The OECD and World Economic Forum have recognized AI-augmented strategic foresight as an emerging discipline. A Competitive Horizon Scan is how Magma practices it: AI scans at scale, a senior human owns every judgment, and every finding is cited, dated, and graded.
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 the other five lenses orbit.
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.
It ships agent-ready too: clean, dated context chunks your own AI tools can read directly, with no slide deck to extract first.
Every finding carries an honesty grade
So you always know how much weight a claim can bear:
PROCEED
Well-sourced. Act on it.
CAVEAT
Directional. Treat as a lead, not a fact.
REFUSE
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.
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
The Scan
A single scan, delivered with a walkthrough so your team understands it and knows the next moves.
The Decision
Everything in The Scan, plus:
- •A facilitated decision session: we pressure-test the findings with your team and agree your top three response moves.
- •A written, board-ready action brief you can take straight to leadership.
- •A second full scan 30 days later, so you see what moved, not just a snapshot.
The Watch
A living watch on your market: twelve scans a year, evolving as your priorities and competitors shift, with an alert whenever something material moves. You see what matters early, while you can still act. Billed monthly or quarterly.
Start at any tier and scale up. Upgrade within 30 days of delivery and the full amount carries over, so you are never locked into where you began.
For context: a scoped strategic-foresight or strategic-planning engagement is typically priced from $12,000 to $45,000. A single Competitive Horizon Scan delivers that at or below the floor of the range, 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. The Watch gives you continuous early warning at a fraction of either, as a service you switch on rather than a role you have to fill.
Why Magma, and Daniel
Magma is led by Daniel Zivkovic: working at the intersection of marketing and enterprise architecture since 1996, the rare person who reads both the market signal and the systems that turn it into action.
He is the current architect-in-residence on the agentic-marketing systems of a Fortune 500 financial-services company.
He founded Serverless Toronto, a practitioner community he has run for eight-plus years, with a long public archive of teaching.
Every engagement is led by Daniel himself, the senior principal who owns the judgment, never handed off to a junior team. Vetting him takes one click, at the bottom of this page.
See the storm before it reaches your market.
The shifts that will reshape it are forming now. A 30-minute call confirms whether strategic foresight can surface them while you can still act. If it fits, your first scan lands within two to three weeks.
A straight answer, not a sales pitch.