Are you there Markstrat? It's me, Jonathan.

Since a new whirlwind of classes spin up next week to usher in the spring semester, I wanted to take a moment to record my thoughts on my biggest challenge from last semester, aside from my professors attempted instance of death-by-case-study-presentation.

My Strategic Marketing Management class employed this online simulation known as Markstrat. With the class split up into groups, the teams spent time each week making decisions on what products to develop, where to sell them, who to sell them to, and how to do it all within the budget. Each Monday the professor ran the simulation and we found out how we did against the other teams competing in the virtual world.

I found the simulation both educational and fun. The simulation does a good job of getting you to think about resource management, market segmentation, product placement, advertising, and the way to have conversations with a team to come to a mutually agreeable strategy.

Markstrat does a pretty good job of simulating what might happen in the course of business, and you can find some common tips and tricks with a Google search. Here's my own addition to the pool of knowledge.

1. Sweep the leg! - Take no mercy on competitors. If you have the chance to shut someone out, go for it. They only stand to come back and take you out. No need to relearn the lesson you should have taken from Saving Private Ryan, right?
2. Knowledge is Power - Invest in marketing research, especially the semantic and MDS scales. Over time they get more useful as you can infer trends and use the calculators built into the simulation (although you should always sanity check those results).
3. Fully fund your IRAD! - Talk about a lesson directly applicable to the day job. During R&D, pay to minimize cost to produce the product. It's a short term pain for long term gain.
4. Vodite FTW? (maybe) - Some will say the first to enter the Vodite market will win the game. We were the first to enter, and the market didn't mature fast enough to catch the enormous market size of the Sonites. Ruling the Sonite market wins the day, and Vodite just shores up your victory.

However*, as much as Markstrat simulates the real world game of marketing successfully, there are a couple non-intuitive gotchas that I will list to help save a future team of Markstratters some trouble:

1. Those are speed holes - The winning team spent little to no money on research and developing new products. Instead, they set perceptual objectives and spent advertising dollars to move the perceived rating to match the ideal rating. For those of you that are reading this and don't speak Markstrat, this essentially means the team, instead of developing a plastic version of the product, the told the market segment that wanted plastic that the wooden version was actually plastic, and the market segment bought it. As a result the team didn't need to spend as much on R&D, whereas we sunk costs to develop new products delivering what customers wanted.
2. Death to Spoofee - Our group made the mistake of treating a customer's desired value as a threshold, not an objective. In other words, we looked at a target price of $500, or a power rating of 7 and said, "If we set the price at $475 and the power at 8, we're giving them more of what they want for less money." Unfortunately the way the simulation works is that if the customer wants to pay $200 and they have the option of two identical products, one for $190 and the other for $200, they will prefer the $200 product.

For those of you embarking on your Markstrat journey, good luck!

*Note that my team did not come in first, so keep that context in mind as you read my feedback.