Markstrat is a well known game in the MBA world. You compete with your batch for the same market, do R&D, launch products, build your brand, do advertising, deploy sales force, collude and what not! (Alright, collusion is not possible because of the Honour Code demon that bars us from placements and gives a straight F in the subject at the smallest violation of rules)
Every product has a four letter name - First letter for the market (S for SONITE market), second letter for firm (U for firm U. There are 5 firms in the industry, A, E, I, O, U), and the last two letters are your imagination for your product.
You are given seven periods, each equivalent to an year and you have to maximize your profits every period.
Our firm is U, so all our products for Sonite market start with SU-
We launched SUST two periods back and it has not really been sust. Instead it has quickly become our star product. However, the surprise came when our recent launch SUSU exceeded expected sales and the production fell short. In fact, this time our production of SUST, SUSU, and SUSI, all, fell short even though we had targeted almost 75% market because of our strategic positioning on all segments. But the markets grew by far and with the targetted sales numbers, we got only 61% market share and the production fell short. But still, this time our net earnings were the highest of all periods, perhaps because we had taken 4 large shots of Vodka before keying in the first marketing mix numbers.
But those names are giving us a ball of a time in all our markstrat sittings and Vodka added to the slime. Krishna told Somesh and Ranjana "Why don't you guys do SUSU (together?!) !" when all he meant was to ask them to plug in the advertising and sales force numbers for the product in the system. And the dirtiest of all happened when we all agreed that we were targetting (our) susu at high earners. Not that subtle, eh!
I have daily discussions with our competitors over the wrangle for the only market and this time I had challanged a firm A girl to do whatever she could but she wouldn't be able to beat us. We beat them up by almost 40 million markstrat currency this time. Dinner tomorrow should be fun. I can't wait to rub it in at her. Dining hall is our most common hangout to socialize and markstrat has only added to the meal time chaos.
The other guy, who is my partner for DMOP assignments, and his group opened champagne last time when they made 41k (as against our 55 million, to put the numbers in perspective). They have seen negative net contributions (read positive losses!) in all other periods so far, so a positive contribution, however small, was a reason to go on a binge. The guys are all set for the B- in markstrat. But he is a good chartered accountant, I can't stop laughing at his markstrat plight everytime I look at him. They made a -1500 this time too. Two days ago, I told him I wished Markstrat had an M&A option with a possibility of a hostile take over if your share price went too low. The guy told me how he wished he could kick me in the nuts, if he were not scared of my biceps.
Life is not fair dude!
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