Week 10

As we continue to advance through the Pharmasim simulation it is time to look back on what we have done. This simulation has put us in the position to be marketing managers for Allstar Brands and work through the marketing management process. This process is long and detailed. It starts with having to analyze a wide variety of data from past years to help determine what your plans will be for the next couple of years. This is data about the market, customers, competitors and products. In Pharmasim, to have enough data to complete this analysis you need to buy all of the reports. Completing this analysis separately then your teammates allows you to analyze the data how you see it. Then you can compare and contrast with your teammates. I noticed that we came up with similar results after the analysis and had similar ideas on our strategy for the next periods. Completing the competitive analysis really helped me complete my understanding of our position in Pharmasim. It allowed us to determine a better pricing strategy and help lower costs. Since the situation analysis required us to purcase almost all of the reports we had data about everything. We were able to review ourselves as a company, our products and the competitors. We were also able to review data about the market's customers. The reported symptoms,  brand perception and purchasing decisions reports helped us understand how the customers picked a product and how we can better address our target market.

In each period of Pharamsim there has been a special decision to make. The decisions can affect how you implement your strategy in that period. The first special decision we had to make was about creating Facebook and Twitter accounts. Creating these social media accounts allowed for us to gain instant and free feedback from consumers about our product. These social media sites led to another special decision we had to make. We were receiving negative comments on the sites and needed to determine how to handle them. We decided get legal advice on how to handle these comments. It was suggested to us to turn off the comments until we have a written policy governing the use of the forum by both customers and employees. One of the most interesting decisions had to do with special advertising. We had the options to place our product in a movie, advertise on a race car or run an ad contests for consumers. We decided to run the ad contests as it got consumers involved.  We had a good response to this decision as there were a number of good entries submitted to the ad contest, and the videos are generating a lot of interest on the web site.

 The most important decision we have made in Pharamsim was to raise our price. With the low price in the early rounds we were generating a lot of unit sales but we did not have a great bottom line. Once we raised our prices we saw a rise in revenue, gross margin and net income. When we were selling Allround at the low price we were operating over capacity by 17%. This increase our costs of goods sold tremendously and hurt our gross margin and net income. With the higher price, unit sales decreased and so did gross margin. This allowed for a better bottom line. Pharmasim has been a good tool in teaching us about the marketing management process. It is really important to understand all of the market data to create a plan for your future.

Towards the end of class Proffessor Spotts talked about a class that WNE is offering that combines engineering and marketing. I look this class my senior year at WNEC, the first year it was offered. It was one of the most interesting class I took in my 4 years there and I learned alot. When I took the class there were a handful of teams that developed a product from scratch and created a company around it. There were other teams that worked a intrapreneur. My team worked with Smith and Wesson developing a new style handcuff. We went through the process of determining the size of our market, who the customers would be, what the existing products are and what could be improved. We determined that a new, lightweight handcuff would help reduce the total weight of the belt that police officers wear. We replaced the steel with aluminum and developed a new connection system for the 2 sides of the handcuffs. As the engineers in our group worked on the product side, the management team developed the business/marketing plan for the product. We determined the market size, who the customers were, who are competitors were and what our competitive advantage was. We did not take the ideas past the classroom but other teams in class thought about getting patents. This was one of the best classes I took while at WNEC.