Going into period 1 we were worried because of how poorly we had done in the practice rounds. We hoped that we could have a miracle happen and that our company would take off.
After learning from our misttakes in the practice rounds we thought we had a better plan of attack in actually knowing how to target our consumers. Our team set out several objectives in the first round:
- Be the first mover into Vodites
- Target one segment per product
- Look closely into production forecast to figure out production numbers
- Utilize advertising
These were our basic goals and were our main takeaways after some research and the practice rounds.
For the first round we decided to target others with SAMA and professionals for SALT, and produced 95,000 and 100,000 units respectively. As others preferred a lower price to pros, we set our prices at two very opposite ends of the spectrum; SAMA was at $215 and SALT at $545. To sell all of those units we used our salesforce expertise from the practice rounds and went big using 34 people for SAMA and 36 for SALT. Finally, after spending all of our money on salespeople, advertising, and market studies as we still didn't know which ones were that important, we didn't get to invest in R&D this period.
The blog of our experience in using Markstrat for our Commerce 363 class at UBC!
This round was way less chaotic. Im happy we set out some long term goals, the rest of the game will be much more easier now that we have some direction. I really hope that focusing our products on one target segment will pay off and we're not missing out on sales by ignoring other groups. I think if we can target each product perfectly to one segment we will be more successful in the long run.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the Perceptual Maps, they were so interesting, I liked visually seeing where we were compared to everyone else. It put things in perspective. One thing that I really don't like so far about the game is the ambiguity of the products we are trying to sell. I have trouble grasping what exactly a Sonite is... if a real product was defined it would make things more realistic.
Guys I was definitely nervous for this one! I think we were a little more prepared for this one but we got too excited by doing our decisions quickly.
ReplyDeleteI am proud that we were close to the second to last team, which means that we are improving! I am positive that in the next round we won't be last. We can do this!!
I think we did a lot better that the previous round because we targeted to only one segment rather than dividing it up into the other ones.
This was probably the most frustrating round because there was too much pressure, since it actually counted!
I like that we work well together, we are a strong team! Good job A-Team :)!!
Next time we should invest in R&D and hopefully we can be closer to number 1!