The Marketing Game is a high involvement learning experience designed to provide a focus on effective marketing strategy planning in a competitive environment. The game gives the participants the opportunity to analyze markets and target market needs. The purpose of the game is to equip the players with the information necessary to make decisions in a number of strategy decision areas including developing an integrated marketing plan to meet your target marketТs needs and earn a profit for you firm.
The first step in tackling The Marketing Game was to understand what the game was about, what we were supposed to be learning from the game and how to be successful at it. The Marketing Game basically places each participant in a Marketing Manager position with the task of developing the marketing plans for the future. The firm we now work for is currently developing a new type of voice recognition device (VRD) with advanced capabilities for controlling computer applications using spoken commands. It was our job to move that product to the top of the market and earn profit for our firm by understanding the market, competitors, and other trends in the external environment.
Although the product market was broad, there were only four companies that could develop the primary voice recognition device for personal computers. This gave us 3 competitors to analyze and position ourselves against yearly. We also needed to understand and monitor the product market segments and product features that directly affected the cost to build the product and in return what we charged for the product.
We decided to begin the game by clarifying what our goals would be. We quickly came to the conclusion that because The Marketing Game was such a crucial part of our semester taking Marketing Management, that a one-dimensional goal was not appropriate. Liz and I came up with three specific goals and the goals were defined based on our desired outcome for The Marketing Game experience, the product we developed (Commando), and the Marketing Management class as a whole. With respect to our VRD product, Commando, we wanted to skyrocket Commando to the number one selling VRD on the market. The game goal was to focus on learning the lessons that the exercises had to offer and personally leverage off Cheri's current sales position at Harris Corporation in a new technological product line.
In the beginning our strategies were simple: Spend the budget and Advertise. The first few weeks we actually found it very difficult to spend the budget and since we were holding on to the top spot with ease, we basically coasted along until we hit level 2. The first period of Level 2 is when we took our first hit. Upon reviewing the decreased revenue for this initial period we decided to refocus and change our strategy. The beginning of Level 2 found us scrutinizing our competitor's results more and trying to anticipate what their next move was going to be. We specifically focused on the following three areas when it came to the competition; Features, Price and Sales Commission. In Level 3, each company had the option of introducing a new product into the market. After careful review of our financial and market situation, Liz and I came to the conclusion that we had no choice but to introduce a product if we wanted to have any chance of keeping the revenue level we had throughout the game. We carefully distributed the budget between both products trying to give each of them a fighting chance. At this point in the game we found it difficult to spread the money to all necessary areas even when using our reserve fund.
When reviewing our strategies and the outcomes of each period we have a number of lessons learned which are very dependent on what level we were working at. As mentioned in the above paragraph that outlined our strategies, during level 1 our decisions were based on our net profit for each period. We basically used the strategy, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. In retrospect we should have immediately defined our target market and focused our decisions on marketing Commando to them. Our decisions for level 2 were based on what our competition was doing. We picked the reports apart trying to guess what each competitor was going to do next, and what we needed to do to get their first. Keeping up with the Jones is the best way to describe our decision making for level 2. We believe now that the right course of action for level 2 would have been to base our decisions on the acceptance or rejection of our the previous periods decisions from the target market we should have defined in level 1. Level 3 was the period where we were given the option of producing a new product. As you'll recall from above, we felt like we had no choice but to introduce a new product in order to keep making money. This is a very risky position to be in, and is not the recommended course of action. The decision to introduce a new product should be to either offer your current target market a specialized version of your product, or to reach a new target market all together.
When reviewing all the lessons learned we decided that the big downfall for us was downsizing. As soon as funds got tight we started massively decreasing our customer service and advertising budgets. This did not work out well for us and when studying the final results of the game it's easy to track the success of the firms who kept these two departments well funded. Some alternatives we should have considered include stabilizing the product for a period or two. Instead of constantly upgrading features, which increased our cost, we should have held steady for a period and focused on marketing to our target market from that point on. We also lacked the sales force motivation in our company. We gave small commission and sales promotion funding which no doubt affected the push of our product. Our sales staff was working at full capacity and the lack of motivation we provided only served to hurt their performance.
When asked what we would do if we had just one more round to complete, we concluded that it probably wouldn't be long enough to pull us back up to the number one position. It's necessary to keep in mind that our competitors were learning lessons just like us. If we all had one more round, the chance that they would make better choices is there as well. So we predict that there wouldn't be a drastic difference from period nine to period ten.
The final period of The Marketing Game left us in the following position (note we are depicted as New Zealand on the graph).
Given a few more rounds however, if we kept moving forward with our late breaking decisions we believe we could push Commando back into the number one selling VRD position by marketing and managing our product better than our competition.
In summary, The Marketing Game was very educational. Marketing is a complex subject that is too often simplified. The intricate decisions that go into marketing a product or a product line are fascinating and receiving this hands-on experience of what it might be like to manage a product was eye opening. The most surprising aspect of this game was the ripple effect that just one decision had on the entire program. The difficulty came because there were so many decisions to make each period that you didn't really have the time to weight the importance of each one until it was too late. It would be very interesting to play the game again, now that we know what we know. Would the knowledge we now have help us to do better the next time or would we just make new mistakes?
