Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Quarter 1 & Quarter 2: Preparation stage 3

Quarter 3: Introduction stage 4

Quarter 4 & Quarter 5: Growth stage 5

Quarter 6: Maturity stage 6

Quarter 7: Decline stage 6

Quarter 8 & Final Result 7

Conclusion 7

References 8

Appendices 9
Introduction

The prime objective of the simulation game is to practice marketing through an interactive
computer-based game in which players are required to run a simulation firm. The report will provide a
computer company's strategic marketing decisions in a competitive and practical perspective with other
competitors.

Quarter 1 and Quarter 2: Preparation stage

At the beginning of the game, we were assigned to groups of 5-6 students to form a company in
the simulation game. Our company name is TEC and our first mission was to establish our company's
segment and outline our business objectives, both personal and shared in the game. After agreeing to
decide each member's responsibilities for the company, we then set our top business objectives, which are
to be the profit margin leader and the high-service provider in the market throughout the quarters. When
we purchased the market research, we began to examine the segment attractiveness, customer demands,
and willingness to pay the price of potential customers and chose to focus on the mass market of
"Innovator" as the top priority, with "Traveler" coming in the second position. While preparing the
designs, we chose our components for the computer-based on client demand data for each specialized
sector segment to produce the first three models, Avant-garde (innovator), Vanguard (innovator), and
Conqueror (traveler), with high quality in compliance with the company's goal statement (Appendix 1).
Finally, in the Americas area, we established our two initial distribution outlets in Chicago and Sao Paulo
due to their strong potential demand, high willingness to pay the price of the "Innovator" and “Traveler”
segments (appendix 2), and reasonable price to set up the sales offices.
Quarter 3: Introduction stage
As we expected, the planning process would be completed in this quarter, and our brand should
be well-known in the market. In this quarter, we began to test marketing by deciding on the remaining
tactics in our marketing strategy, which are setting the selling prices, hire the proper sales force and
schedule the ads in local media. At first, We started by deciding on the pricing for our computers. Our
production expenses were rather high due to the advanced features of our brand designs. Because we did
not yet have any pricing-related information from rivals, we set the price a bit high than the average price
willing to pay by collecting statistics from all countries in the region to suit our objective. Despite
knowing that, for a higher return on investment, our company should have utilized the "best-cost"
approach, focusing on both reduced costs and upscale differentiation (Turner, 2017), we were forced to
put our pricing at the second-highest price in the same market category. On the other hand, we set the
price rebate at a pretty high level, up to $110 (Appendix 4). Following that, TEC wanted to add more
features to the Conqueror, which cost us $60,000 to modify. Last, we created one ad for each product line
that would feature strong product consistency while also meeting customer criteria and layout
requirements. In addition, we so invested quite much in local media placement to make our brands visible
across several platforms. These investments were made since there was a possibility of research and error
to our products in the first three quarters.
Quarter 4 & Quarter 5: Growth stage
Despite ranking first place ad judgment, our team's overspending on ad strategy in the third
quarter resulted in a very bad financial performance outcome. Unfortunately, the data revealed that our
Vanguard (innovator) brand was seriously underperforming in terms of sales and brand judgment. TEC
decided to update the Vanguard to Eager Beaver (innovator), an alternative brand, with new demanding
features that would be appropriate for the market at the time. In terms of market share, although TEC's
share percentage accounted for 11 percent in quarter 4, TEC surprisingly came in second in market share
in our key segments "Innovator" and "Traveler" (appendix 5). Furthermore, knowing the pricing of our
competitors, we attempted to decrease our prices even further because we sought to lower the costs and
maximize the profit margin. We also intend to expand into the APAC area after purchasing market
research, and we decided to open an office in Tokyo in quarter 4. At the close of the fourth quarter, TEC
made a serious mistake by shutting the Sao Paulo office instead of investing in R&D research to improve
our brands to satisfy market standards. 

In quarter 5, the Tokyo office took us one quarter more to put on sales as a result of setting up
time. even though overall sales (both units sold and cost of goods sold) grew (Appendix 6), we did not
have the opportunity to expand our sales due to the lack of a single office. TEC then lost some certain
market share since our competitors began to established additional offices across the world, and their
sales increased considerably. As a consequence of the report demand and analysis, our target segments
have been reordered as follows: 1 - Traveler, 2 - Workhorse, 3 - Innovator; to maximize the sales and
increase the unit volume of our biggest potential segment “Traveler” (Appendix 6). TEC invested in
updated improved R&D for all brands, as well as increased advertising in regional media. TEC's brands at
the end of the fifth quarter are Astronaut (traveler), Initiator (workhorse), and Eager Beaver I. (innovator)
(Appendix 6).
Quarter 6: Maturity stage
TEC entered this quarter with more loss of market sharing due to other rivals' expansion in
offices and sales. The "Traveler" segment continuously performed well with the "Astronaut" laptop and
became our primary sales income. Because we were at the maturity stage so our company had to carefully
in making decisions to maximize our investment and company profits. Following that, TEC began
decreasing manufacturing costs by minimizing the components in the brand design and focused more on
outstanding features to fulfill demand requirements. On the one hand, our company reduced its
advertising spending, while on the other, the company made acquisitions to open seven more offices in
three different areas (Appendix 7). Additionally, as to attract new customers from the "Mercedes"
segment, our company renovated the previous three brands and introduced a new variant called "Clerical"
to be our new underdog brand for our flanker strategy in the Mercedes segment, and it was hoped to be
our moneymaker in the next quarter (Appendix 7).

Quarter 7: Decline stage

In this quarter, our group's efforts to bring the company back to a positive financial performance
statistic failed. TEC lost its market share and dropped entirely behind its direct rivals in the mass market
(appendix 8), although our highest market share was still traveler segment accounted for 10% of our
market share, resulting in the TEC’s serious loss of sales and profits. Furthermore, even though the ad
rate remained at an acceptable level, our brand judgment decreased dramatically. surprisingly, the
“Clerical” brand we introduced in the previous quarter turned out to be a big success in the “Costcutter”
sector so we kept on upgrade it and adjust the price to be our moneymaker for the last quarter. This
quarter, our firm put in a lot of work to develop and align our sales force investment strategy. The idea
was to keep a good number of salespeople in each office while also creating a performance competition
among employees so that there would be a strong push in sales for the last quarter. Further, we were
particularly concerned about increasing our company's cumulative total performance points so that we
might do better in the remaining phases. To improve our market share in the next quarter, TEC decided to
decrease our prices by a small amount (appendix 8) and implement the "psychological pricing" strategy,
especially attractive pricing, since all bikes' prices have a "9" at the end (Boachie, 2016). 
Quarter 8 and Final Result: Harvesting

We didn't discover out numerous issues until the final quarter. Our group did not make use of
market research properly by not checking rivals' tactics such as extending to different markets or
modifying pricing to match the stage's condition, which was one of the reasons why TEC fell severely
behind in many prior quarters. Thankfully, with all the last effort we put to adjust our mistakes in the
close of the seventh quarter, our company, TEC, has reached a significant milestone of generating more
than 31 million in sales in quarter 8 (appendix 9). Our firm ended up increasing our total performance
score and was ranked third place among all rivals in the mass market (appendix 9).

Conclusion
In general, our team's marketing efforts for the simulation game were detailed in the written
reflective report above. The objective of our company for this simulation game was to get the highest
profit margin among rivals, however, our company failed due to poor solutions and judgments. However,
the strategic thinking lessons, collaboration skills, and statistics analysis abilities learned from this game
are valuable.
 References

Boachie, P. (2016, July 21). 5 Strategies of 'Psychological Pricing'. Entrepreneur.

        Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279464

Turner, P. (2017, September 26). How to Use the Best Cost Provider Strategy.

Bizfluent. Retrieved from https://bizfluent.com/how-7441362-use-cost-provider-strategy.html