A Zero Sum Game That Means One Team 's Gain

We evaluated our company’s position in the industry, and found ourselves in an excellent starting position to further develop our products and match them to the industry’s needs. Our market share is adequate and we can advance further with our strategy improve and reposition our products in the coming years. We have underutilized capacity, which we intend to improve, while increasing automation to reduce costs. We have plans to improve our promotion to improve product awareness and with the appropriate product lines we will increase price to improve margins and better align our high-end product image. Our current financial position is optimistic, showing our leverage (Assets/Equity) at 2.0, when our goal is to maintain 1.5-2.0 overall. By utilizing the analysis tools we are learning what elements are driving demand, how to effectively tailor our products through R&D, how best to adjust our marketing and pricing, while lowering input costs, in order to improve margins and to ensure our stakeholders are all satisfied.

The team’s unique reasoning behind the choice of strategy that we executed throughout the simulation played a significant role and set the tone toward the effort and attitude that each team member maintained during the process. The strategy of the broad differentiator was the teams choice, because we thought that it would be the most difficult to accomplish, would take the most time, and provide us all with a well rounded learning experience because we would be able to learn how to be successful in both the low and high tech segment with our products instead of just one of the segments. With our previous knowledge about running a business we all were in agreement that if we could sacrifice and work harder to participate in both segments it would lead to some great competitive advantages. As mentioned by Lui, (2013), “the only competitive global business strategies would be based on differentiation by unique specialization in terms of quality, product, service technology, or cost leadership” (p.2824). The great execution of the strategy by our team enabled us to find success and gain different competitive advantages with each of our sensors, in turn accomplishing our goal of meeting the needs and expectations of both the low and high tech segment.

Teams were able to introduce a new line of microcomputers in four different regions. All five teams were entering the market at the same time and they started with exactly the same amount of resources and knowledge of the market. There were three business segments in PC market. The higher priced Mercedes segment, included high performance computer for use in engineering and manufacturing applications. The medium priced, largest group of customers was the Workhorse segment, which was based on easy to use PC. The Traveler segment included practical computer to use while traveling and their customers were price sensitive. In quarter one, the teams were to establish their firm and set up their shop. Following, in quarter two, the teams dived in to test the market. In quarter three, the teams had to make some changes and decided on market expansion. In quarter four, they made choices to invest in the future. In quarter five, they had to expand their business strategies. In quarter six, they were able to adjust their firm’s strategies, tactics, study the market, review financials, evaluation production data if it was

After completing 8 rounds of simulation, we achieved an encouraging result in all performance indicators like net income, market share, stock price and shelf space. Our core product ALLROUND also positions as a market leader after 8 rounds of struggling. Exhibit 1 to 8 shows the performance summary of ALLSTAR in each period. Exhibit 9 to 15 shows our performance in different performance indicator. We also summarize our strategies and tactics throughout 8 periods by 4P analysis, BCG matrix analysis and Aaker’s Brand Equity Model in the following sections.

Due to the growing competition and diminishing market share, companies are opting for different strategies to achieve their survival objectives as well as growth. Companies are thus executing grand strategies to provide their businesses with a clear direction for its strategic actions. These strategies, therefore, aim at both short term and long term sustainability and growth, and they include innovation, market development, product development, and concentration.

In today’s highly competitive market, the continuous changes that are occurring in the social, politic and economic environment create serious challenges in the corporate world. Corporations cannot afford to do business as usual if they want to remain in the game and be successful. In order to achieve their goals and objectives, they need to evolve, adapt, learn and apply different new strategies that will help them secure long-run success and performance. Among those strategies, we are going to discuss ten of them and their advantages in connection with corporation’s goals and objectives.

From a production perspective, we invested heavily in the early rounds in automation and building capacity for the new products. In the early rounds, we also invested a lot in marketing to create as high a customer awareness as possible.

Today’s market demands organizations to have a strategic plan. The purpose of the strategic plan describes where the organization wants their organization to go. A strategic plan is a document used to communicate goals, and the actions needed to achieve those goals. In order to remain competitive every organization needs to innovate to stay ahead of the competition. They need to develop new products and services with increasing frequency. The design of these new products and services must meet, or exceed, customer expectations and at the same time, they must generate an acceptable financial return for the organization. However, any business that does not realize the importance of developing new products will not last very long as a consequence

Typically, our firms performance objectives was to be sustainable and profitable as a business while at the same time achieving customer satisfaction for our main consumer segments; singles, family, and enterprisers and value seekers. Our generic marketing strategy was focused around a balance of cost leadership, and product differentiation. Cost leadership was employed strategically for our economy and family car, executed with emphasis on efficiency and safety. In period one, our firm was positioned positively and strong; sales were at a profitable level of $20,516.

Hence, it is hard for me to recover in that situation. I only reached the cumulative profit of -10.48M for the first time I played. Reasons contributed to the results are many. Firstly, I did not have clear position at first and did not stick to my long term plan; I managed to innovate in both the NiMH and also the UC technology. External environment changes also affect the sales and profit significantly. For example, the Lithium-ion battery producers made the price deduction influenced the price I offer to my customers. The other difficulty I faced is that customers preference changes are hard to predict. For instance, the customers’ increase of importance of recharge time has led to my investment in desired energy density not generating deserved customer preference. Even worse, the constant price reduction request made my company profit shrink. The challenge is that it is almost impossible for me to innovate in the two area to try to maximum my sales for all the customers. Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory also explains my failure experience, that is: every company that has tried to manage mainstream and disruptive business within a single organisation failed. The next time I play, I will nurture the disruptive UC technology in an separate entity and try sticking to a long term plan. I should manage the two technologies separately. Another important lessen learnt was that once decide a plan or a strategy, keep sticking to the strategy

A company needs to create a series of programs to differentiate their product from those from its competitors and to appropriately price the product to achieve the maximum demand, in order to set up the dynamics of its competitive strategy (David, 2007). The competitive strategy of a company is also expected to offer better products or services to its customers, at a reasonable cost. Due to the mass influence of the external environmental on the customers’ preference, it is vital for the company to develop an available competitive strategy to be able to solve a series of problems, and ultimately to improve the company’s performance. Those problems include: how to differentiate its products or service from competitors, how to create market segments to maximize demands, and how to offer a wider range of products or services to better meet the customers’ needs at more acceptable costs (David, 2007).

The main challenge the company incurred in the late 1990, was to be able to achieve and maintain its critical mass in all product lines in order to maintain better bargaining power and relationships with its buyers and subsequently maintain its profit margins above 15% and achieve higher price/earnings multiplies and achieving increasing returns to scale (Whitelegg 1997).

New Product Development : the aggressive investment strategy into R&D division led to speed in releasing new products in the market. This gave the company higher ROI returns projections. The faster cycle of innovation led to multiple product availability in the market which led to further increasing the gap between them and the competitions and also the company indulged in manufacturing self brand products rather than Co-branded or Partnerships.

The two companies’ product lines had little direct overlap, but they did share many of the same

Investing in research and development to create new product line or enhance current products adds considerable expenses. Development costs will need to be re-cooped. This will keep competitors in check, but will be challenging to keep pricing competitive.