We finished the game up coming in 3rd, which we were very proud of accomplishing. It has been quite an adventure, we treated the game as if we truly existed in this world, in this company, stressing over sales and stock prices of our Sonites and Vodites more than focusing on our actual lives.
Since you have already journeyed with us through our learning venture and seen what we learned, liked, disliked, and our mistakes, this final post will now explain what we will do if we did have a future, and summarize the the main points we want to get across about the game. We hope our words of wisdom will help generations yet to come to conquer the Markstrat world.
What we should do if we had a chance to continue the game:
Though we were proud of our accomplishments from our hard efforts put into the game, we did also learn a lot from our mistakes as we moved from period to period. To be completely honest, we have made some big mistakes or overlooked some important areas. We are not ashamed to admit this since we started off knowing nothing at all about the game and being complete idiots in the first two practice rounds. We came a long way.
If God gave us another chance to take over the Markstrat world from where we ended off, we would definitely have became number 1 (true leaders always have confidence in themselves).
In our last decision period, because of our high market share domination in the Vodite period after just one period of releasing our first Vodite Vaxy, we were a bit greedy and decided to create Vajo to take over the rest of the Vodite market because we had the money and ability to do so. However, since we were on our last period, we had no time to do any further R&D so we released Vajo based off Vaxy. We made sure to target a different segment, specifically Adopters because we realized the rest of the Vodites from other companies have not been targeting (or successfully targeting) Adopters. We researched and made tests on our target segment, prices, salespeople, and distribution. However, when we released Vajo, our Vaxy sales dropped and our Vajo sales were not high either. We believe this happened because we did not do R&D and we based our Vajo off of Vaxy, thus confusing the public of our products. No matter what else we did, if the two products are not differentiated well, even if the price/service/location are great, customers will not be motivated to buy an undetermined product. If we had the chance to continue with our Vodite market, we would re-brand our Vajo product, still targeting Adopters as they are a market that has not been dominated yet, but we would try to differentiate our Vajo product separately from our Vaxy. We need the clear differentiation to regain our power from our Vaxy with Followers and create a separate dominance in Adopters for Vajo.
As for our Sonites, if we had the chance to continue the game, we would definitely think of re-positioning and improving our Sonite market. Our Sonites were strong in general before the last periods kicked in and companies started to introduce Vodites. Our SAMA were always stable and our SALT was our money-maker. We pinpointed our target market and brand characteristics so well that SALT always did very well in each period, we even had excess demand for a few periods even after we generously increased our production. When we introduced SACK, it was also stable and attracted our target market of Hi-Earners. However, SAMA started to slip not long after we introduced SACK, then all three of them dropped in sales when Vodites started appearing everywhere. SAMA especially, we believe because it was in its declining stage after remaining so long in the market with a more unstable target market (Others), it started doing terrible. With SALT and SACK, even though they also dropped in sales, it wasn't in the extremes and we felt we could have regained our market shares from them once we stabilized our Vodites. So we feel that if we continued the game, since SAMA wasn't improving at all even after we tried different tactics of increasing its sales, we would probably stop the production of SAMA, sell off the inventory, and take it off the market. The opportunity cost of keeping SAMA does not outweigh just stopping the product altogether. For SALT and SACK, we feel that they are not yet at their declining stages, especially with SACK since we introduced the product not too long ago and with SALT, even if its at the maturity stage, with a little re-positioning, we feel that they could do well again. We probably will not change the target segments for the two brands as we don't want to tamper with the possibility of capturing no market at all, but we will probably differentiate the two brands better as their target segments are similar (Pros and Hi-Earners). We will equally split the time between analyzing our Vodites and Sonites so we won't be favouring one over the other and losing sales.
The most important points we learned playing the game:
- Do not just guess production, study trends and market predictions carefully before you make a decision. Over producing causes huge costs in inventory, under producing lets you lose a lot in sales
- R&D is very important in determining the success of a product (yes, before it's even released)
- Advertising expenditure is needed, no point in having a perfect product if no one knows about it
- Budget allocation is very important, it's very easy to go over budget if you don't plan properly where you're spending and why you're spending. Don't run out of money and not be able to release those Vodites!
- We felt Brand Awareness and Brand Purchase Intentions did not help much in determining if a product will do well in the next periods. It's useful to look at, but much more research needs to be done for production and targeting decisions (e.g. perceptual maps, market forecast, competitors' information...etc)
- Changing anything dramatically in the middle of the game will not work. Try to do as much research and be firm in your choices (e.g. target segments, product prices, distribution...etc) in the beginning. Big changes will tend to confuse or turn away potential customers.
- Spend time on some trial-and-error decisions, like explained below, sometimes Markstrat responds irrationally to strategic decisions. Trial and error will help you become more comfortable and familiar with the game and balance and stabilize decisions.
- No matter how strategic you and your team are, how much planning you put into your decisions, some things we believe still purely happen by chance and will surprise us and we have no control over. (Don't take this point for granted! Strategy is very very important, we're just saying that just like in real life, you can't predict everything.
How we feel the Markstrat Simulation can be improved:
Our team gained a lot of insight through the game, we personally feel that this one game alone has taught us how marketers in the real world make decisions in a company. The simulation was realistic, and we knew it did actually follow how a real industry would work and how companies would operate and react to competitors.
However, there are areas in the simulation we felt could be improved on. So if any Markstrat engineers are reading this, this section is for you!
- It was troublesome for some to not be able to view more than one screen at a time. It was frustrating especially when we wanted to look at the different studies we bought and compare them side by side, or compare different period decisions with each other.
- Also, we felt that more guidance either in the manual, or in the help section could be provided for Markstrat, especially in the beginning. Not knowing what to do compromised our position a lot, we understand that everyone started off not knowing what to do, but that just wasted valuable periods where we could have been more confident with our decisions and could have been learning more if we knew what we were actually doing.
- Since this simulation is more a marketing course, we felt more creative options for advertising could have been helpful. It would have been very fun and informative if we could have somehow created advertisements or been able to use different tactics to market our products instead of just typing in numbers.
Again, our team would just like to once again commend the game to end our post. Markstrat has been a great adventure and excellent learning tool. It provides a hands-on experience that no lectures can teach. We hope we will be able to use what we learned from the game and apply the strategies and concepts to our future careers.
