Final Reflections

Overall, Markstrat was a unique experience. Our team really enjoyed the competitiveness of the game and the weekly battles for market position! Markstrat offers an amazing amount of detail and lets you control all the facets of a company.

In terms of things we would change, the instruction book was a little vague; especially when it came to what constituted a product modification. We ended up making a number of decisions based on incorrect information because we made incorrect inferences from the little information provided. As well, the R&D section lacked a lot of detail and left us with a bunch of unanswered questions. Things like base cost vs. minimum realistic cost were not explained at all and left us questioning which to use for our decisions. Some of the analysis tools we never figured out how to use (i.e. regression analysis). The book did not have any information on how to use them and so we ended up ignoring them for the most part.

In conclusion, the game as a whole was well worth the effort and we would recommend it to further classes

Period 10

We managed to maintain our 2nd place position this period. Our continued success is primarily thanks to general growth in volume sales for all of our Sonites. SONO continues to be our big “money-maker”— it’s contribution adds almost $30 million to our total profits! Despite a number of the other Teams losing their market share and competitive positions in the market, we must not forget that we are way behind Team E. Looking ahead, we will modify our VOTI to have it better targeted towards the Followers market. As well, we may introduce another Vodite to capture more market share in this rapidly growing market. As was mentioned above, our Sonites continue to perform well and with more advertising and more optimal sales force allocation, we will aim for constant growth of around 20% in volume sold in periods to come.

The long term outlook for Company O is looking positive at this point. A major goal will be to close the gap between Team E and ourselves; our plans call for the meeting of this objective within three periods. We may even look into coordinating with Team E to create a duopoly environment that will be beneficial to both of our companies (as in the Coke and Pepsi industry); we recognize that there may not be a lot of incentive for Team E to agree to this now, but we feel that after closing the gap between our two companies they may be more inclined to take us up on our offer.

Period 9

2nd place! Our initiatives are falling nicely into place for a strong finish.

Probably the smartest decision we have made to date was dropping SOCK; strategically it freed up valuable resources to push our more entrenched and popular products. We managed to not only get rid of all the inventory of SOLD and SOBO but also sold much more of them this period (almost 100% growth in volume sold for both of the Sonites). As well, we gained a lot of market share in both the Sonite and Vodite markets this period. However, even with our large gains in market share Team E continues to dominate the industry and their success is being reflected in their skyrocketing stock price. Nonetheless, a lot of positives resulted from our previous decisions and it is nice to see our increased sales force is helping to generate enormous sales.

Team E has built a comfortable cushion for themselves but Company O will never give up!