SimBrand Report

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.

To regain some of its market share in its “growth driven” and “stable profit generators” sectors, Sony can reposition its competition in the minds of consumers. For instance, Sony can use comparative advertising to demonstrate that its brands are superior to its competitors. In this situation, Sony can attempt to alter the portrayed image of its competitor, Nintendo, and position its PlayStation game console as the better-quality product (Positioning(marketing), n.d).

Pricing can play an important role in the success or disaster of any product. Too high a price and the product will fail; too low a price and not enough profits will be made to sustain business operations (Hisrich, Peters, & Shepherd, 2014). The key is to make the customer think that they are paying exactly the right price for the product. Anything else though in this regard means the product is not positioned well in the mind of the consumer. First of all, Gril-Kleen will have to decide on what sort of strategy it needs to pursue. This strategy is decided on three factors namely costs, margins and competition.

Market live is an online game that helps to educate students in making real life business decisions and seeing their results. The game included five teams that were starting new companies entering the microcomputer business. They were given investment money to help them start their business. By using that capital to open sales offices, web sites, design their brand, and build their factory. Since microcomputer industry was in the introductory stage of the product cycle there was no previous history nor established competitors. The teams were given six quarters to get their companies up and running. In those quarters each team should have become self-sufficient and earned substantial profits from their operating decisions. The team’s cumulative performance

Perreault, William D., Joseph P. Cannon, and E. Jerome McCarthy. Basic Marketing: A Marketing Strategy Planning Approach. 19th ed. N.p.: McGraw Hill, n.d.

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 positioning strategy should be driven by the market, rather than by the ambitions of the product champions. The source of the problem is failure to understand how consumers' value product attributes. In all, over-appreciating a breakthrough or new technology that

This gain value and addresses a key decisive achievement factor in the industry (Grant,2010). As position is important to offer convenience and a deep assortment, An extra unique intangible resource would be their brand representation and customer loyalty, this is vital since it can attract or attract consumers and it could be necessary to build the brand image .

For any business to successfully add value they either do so through lower costs or superior benefits to the consumer by offering product differentiation (Singh 2012). Samsung was a late starter into the smart phone industry, while, this has not prevented them from successfully positioning their product at the forefront against those offered by their competition such as Apple. Gary Armstrong (2011) defines a product’s position as “the complex set of perceptions, impressions and feelings that consumers

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.

Andrews integrated Cost Leader/Differentiator with Product Lifecycle Focus strategy. They invested huge amount of capital in high-end, low-end, and traditional segments. In order to reduce the labor cost for the long term, they add four automation levels in the low-end segment. They intends to move their product Adam from high end to low end gradually, therefore, Adam didn’t be revised so much at the first round. In the third round, Adam successfully fell into the traditional segment. On the evidence of adding automation to Adam in the second round, our conjecture can be proved. Additionally, heavily invested in promotion and sales budget in the three segments lead to a high level of awareness and accessibility, as a result, they stand out from the competition right now. As team Andrew has two products in both high end and traditional segment, they will take some of our market share.

However, lowering the price decreases the overall profit of the market thus, non-price competition is most important win-win strategy for all the firm. As the game, does not allow us to make product differentiation, the other method that can increase the sales are advertising, product development and E-commerce enhancement. If these expenditures are below market average level, the firm can lose the market share.

After analyzing the results from the previous quarter, it was determined that the prices set for each segment were not sufficient. Product sales priority were also not properly adjusted. With the R&D investments, sales priorities needed to be changed for the main focus to become the most profitable market segments. Prices were not competitive which in turned decreased revenue, market share, and profitability. To become more competitive we altered the prices in each market segment. The Workhorse product was the first to change, the price was lowered to $2500 in an attempt to increase sales; at this price Team 4 was still making a profit on this product, as well as making the price much more competitive. The Workhorse sales priority was also lowered to 3rd in Americas and 4th in APAC and EMEA. This product was not selling as well as we had hoped, and was no longer as profitable as it once was which led to this decision. Next, the Innovator product’s price was adjusted; this involved a price increase to $4100. This price was adjusted to include the new

In order to achieve an unconventional spot in the market place, Michael et Augustin has to identify competition, potential customers and create customer value propositions. As we have seen in the first part of this paper, there are many competitors with similar products, yet, there are high end producers like Fauchon and Hediard. Division of the market implies that Michael et Augustin can find a spot between these

During the business simulation course, we organised a team to become an automotive start-up company and introduced four new products, vehicle models, to satisfy the investors who invested us £500M. Each 4 rounds, we had entered board room to report our initial result and upcoming plans.