Results:
The game did not start off very well for us. We did just as well as in the practice rounds, dead last. Our stock price was only $925 and we were the only team to have our price drop from the starting point of $1000. We desperately needed to do something different we felt, but much of our research had told us not to panic, so we didn't.
Decisions:
Our SAMA's were flying off the shelf, but our SALT's were taking off slowly despite more advertising money being put into them. We had no inventory for SAMA and only 7,000 units for SALT which was a good sign. We also possessed 20% of the market which was not too far off of third highest, and first was only at 24%.
Our decisions this round varied slightly in pricing, salesforce, advertising and R&D. In pricing we decided to keep our SAMA price the same and lower SALT's price to $486 to attract more customers. We upped production levels 20,000 units for each brand as we had little inventory and the market forecast was strong, and upped the salesforce by 10 people for each brand, while focusing on department stores and mass merchandisers for SAMA while working on specialty and department stores for SALT. We only increased advertising by $100,000 this round as we sunk money into R&D. We put $100,000 into PSACK, $350,000 in PVAXY and $100,000 into PVAJO.
We submitted our decisions hoping that all would go well for this round and we would finally move out of last place!
The blog of our experience in using Markstrat for our Commerce 363 class at UBC!
Its a little disheartening coming in last again. I think if we just stay focused and stick to our goals we will be just fine! The development of SACK, VAXY and VAJO is exciting. That number of products will be a lot more to manage, but if we can pull it off we will surely improve our standing in the game.
ReplyDeleteR&d is Exciting Stuff! I hope we're not biting off more than we can chew.
I hope next round we will improve and not be last place again! How frustrating!
ReplyDeleteThis is the round where we put R&D into two vodites and one new sonite. We should have picked one vodite because we clearly did not have enough money! I think at this point we were a little nervous that we were constantly falling in last place.
I think we were too eager to do better that we tried to include as many products as possible. If we had focused on one new sonite, improving our old sonites, and one vodite we would do better.
We were definitely confident we would improve and get 1st place.
The most exciting part of this round was definitely picking the names for our products. All of thought and process went into this decision. There was a lot of argument, but finally we all agreed on SACK, VAJO and VAXY!