Niche Cost Leader Strategy

“When the simulation began, we felt confident in our team’s vision, goals, and strategic plan. After the first rollover, we quickly became aware that the success of a company relies heavily on the dynamics of the market. The strategic decisions of competitors weigh heavily on the overall direction of a company. Our original plan quickly became obsolete in the tumultuous bike industry, and we were forced to re-evaluate our competitive positioning. To this end, we learned

The purpose of this paper is assessing my strategy and decisions in the simulation Biz Café. Then, I will give my results and explain how I got there. However, there were many factors involved creating these results. In this simulation, everything was left up to me to decide how to run my new coffee shop. There were big decisions at the beginning you had to make to create the overall theme of your business. Then, I was to hire employees, buy goods, and act on specials decisions or react to good or bad customer reactions. This, I will explain more in the following paragraphs.

Marketplace Business Simulator is an on-line marketing simulation that incorporates all the marketing principles I have learned over the course of this semester and apply them into real world marketing practice. Simulation was used for the sake of instigating effective results and in that regard, this paper analyses the manner in which each quarter was carried through. The circumstances surrounding each of the decisions made are analyzed intricately and hence a manifestation of the impact of each for each of the quarters is laid bare.

Target sells its products from the high end of the market to the low end depending on the type of product in question. In regards to Electronics items where the caption rate is small, they price their items at the high end to ensure they meet their margins. However, in regards to Target’s name brand items, they price those at the low end, keeping the company as a discounted retailer. Target also sells designer items that range from mid to high range of the market. In 2013 Targets CEO Gregg Steinhafel adopted the philosophy “a penny saved is a penny earned”. He further mentioned that they company would be a penny higher in price than their competitors Wal-Mart (Davis, M 2013). Steinhafel stated that “We want to be a penny

I believe that this simulation was a great tool in helping us as MBA candidates to see just how companies succeed and/or fail to achieve their growth targets in revenue and profitability. However, an organization heightens the probability of achieving profitable growth whenever it has a clear expansion strategy and a strong execution infrastructure. One without the other impairs the probability of success. I conclude that there are two main reasons for such: 1) inadequate consideration of opportunities within the core business, adjacent to the core business or within new customer sub-segments; 2) an organizational infrastructure that cannot support successful execution.

To achieve a high net income and be effective in fulfilling contracts in the simulation, it was important to have a strategy set in place. This requires a standard of control over how the business was going to operate and fulfill orders effectively. In order to gain a higher reputation to secure higher value contracts within the game, I worked to acquire specific contracts and purchasing materials to produce the items that would be shipped out to customers. I also found it important to have employees who were highly skilled within each area that they were employed in order to maximize the production process. By having higher skilled employees, I found it easier to continually fulfill contracts at a constant rate as and minimize slack between each area of production. I also found it highly important within the simulation to be able to adapt quickly to changing market and contact requirements because each required a different set of machines, number of materials and time to be produced. It was very important to understand the time constants in order to effectively produce and fulfill each contract within the time that was allotted. Having a diversified production process was also important so that the production process wasn’t constrained to producing one type of contract. Through the game, I learned the

Since quarter one was the first quarter of this simulation, I was unaware of how difficult it was going to be to make all the different decisions. Firstly, I had to choose a Company name. Because I was selling computers, I thought that the name “Dev-Tech” was a perfect fit being that this simulation was about development and technology. Next, I had to choose a target segment. I knew going into this simulation that it would be better to invest in the more expensive goods as it would benefit me in the end. The segment that didn’t care about price was Mercedes, so that is the segment that I made my first priority.

In terms of Porter’s analysis, cost-leadership and product differentiation strategies were implemented by the team during the simulation, which resulted in the maximum profit of 278.59 million dollars.

Niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact. It is also a small market segment

Initially, our firm’s business position was at a healthy position. In the beginning of the simulation, our overall market share for the automobile industry was 28.2%; the highest in the market. We realized that our primary strength from product contribution came from our economy car Alec with 63.5% market share for economy cars, and from our utility car, awesome with a 48.5% market share for its vehicle class. Thus, it was evident what we needed to do; maintain high market share of our leading cars while conforming our least profitable vehicle class sustainably to coordinate to customer demand.

Staples, the world’s number one office supply chain, and Office Depot, the world’s number two office supply chain, compete with one another in the big-box retail industry. The companies’ “Strategic Group” is office supply retailers.

Over the past three weeks in the University of Phoenix Marketing Management class, I have completed three simulations based on real life marketing situations. The first simulation was titled, "Forecasting Market Demand." This simulation discussed the importance of determining the future demand for your product in the voice commanded software industry. The marketing team for the new Listensoft software needed to accurately forecast the production capacity of the new product and the pricing strategy. This task is especially difficult because human behavior is difficult to predict. Forecasting behavior "…is about generating numbers out of expectations, opinions, statements, prior patterns and a host of other subjective elements" (Forecasting

Dell Company has a successful business strategy. As it is following cost leadership strategy. Its success story is hidden in cost proposition, delivery, and unique customization. In response to the high performance and better chances for growth Dell is applying two way strategy parallel to one another.

Hello by now you know what’s involved in becoming an affiliate marketer. You need to offer quality products that will solve a problem that people have. The larger the problem, the more potential for sales you will have. Now the latest email showed you where to find products and as you can see there are a lot of places that offer products. But you just can’t go out there and start promoting any old product. You have to start ferreting out what people are complaining about. You have to find out what people need to solve their problems.

I used a general strategy throughout the entire simulation. Fist I calculated whether to overstock or understock each of the phone models. Next, I found the demand estimates based on the standard deviation and the stocking levels of each model. Also, I picked the design features based on the opinions of the members of my team, or using a consensus forecast. I did however constrain the number of features so it didn’t decrease the uncertainty in demand. The board members all had different objectives that I took into consideration throughout the simulation.