Practice Rounds

Going into the practice rounds our group was quite nervous.  We had all crammed, researched, and interrogated our friends for any potential research that we could find to help us with our strategy in the game.

We sat down at our first team meeting as complete strangers to somehow try and figure out a strategy to win the game.  We started our first practice round (not knowing there would be a second) feeling like lost children.  Without knowing what really to attempt, or where to even start for that matter we started clicking the surveys that were given to us.

Completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that was given to us, and having absolutely no idea how to interpret and convert that data into our company's decisions, we set out into the abyss that is the Markstrat world.

In the first practice round we kept it simple and just tried to figure out our sales strategy on how to succeed in the game.  By using the rough information that our professor Juliet Zhu gave us in our first markstrat class we decided to focus on production and only really look at the marketing mix decision area (we really had no clue what else to do).  Our two products SAMA and SALT were targeted at others and professionals respectively, along with SAMA's price being low and SALT's being high to keep aligned with those markets. After deciding pricing we did some rough math to calculate our production level using the consumer's willingness to buy and consumer brand awareness surveys. WE allocated our sales people lightly to save on costs and sparingly used our money on marketing, research and spent nothing on R&D (it wasn't available). Not really knowing what else to do we submitted our decisions and crossed our fingers.

We Sucked. Last Place, and the only team to lose money.

We went to class that next Tuesday baffled and thinking we were all going to fail.

That class cleared up the game for us a tonne, as well as relieved us as we got another practice round. We learned all about perceptual maps (Paul's favorite thing in the world), branding, R&D, base costs and MDS studies.  After that class our team was so much more confident and we felt that we could improve our results tenfold. So we met the next day at 3pm.

We sat down again, and picked up the shambles of SAMA and SALT and tried to rebuild them.  Actually looking at all of our information and understanding it more, we were able to make more educated decisions.  This time we re-aligned our products and used the studies to align our sales people, marketing efforts, and production values.  We also found out that our money did not carry over this round and we should spend it all (foolish of us the first practice round). We submitted these decisions expecting a HUGE improvement in our stock price and a skyrocket into first place.

Didn't happen. We were still last.

Thinking we were all going to fail still, and scrambling to figure it all out we left the practice rounds and prepared for the first round of the real Markstrat simulation.