Marketplace simulation

Marketplace Live Summary

To start matters off on the Marketplace Live simulation, for the Quarter 1 decisions, the name that was chosen for company was Infinitech. This name seemed appealing for it was supposed to associate the infinite possibilities the company could provide through the use of superior technology compared to the other market competitors. Concerning Infinitech’s target market segment, analyzing the wants, needs and prices willing to be paid of Workhorse, Mercedes and Traveler, Workhorse ended up being the market segment of choice . Following this decision, the responsibilities I assigned to myself pertaining to the company were President of the company as the primary and the VP-Brand Management as the secondary. For the final decision for Quarter 1, and also with the company still being in its infancy, expenses were kept to a minimum so out of the four open available sales offices in Chicago, Sao Paolo, Shanghai and Paris, Sao Paolo was chosenm since at $80,000 it was the least expensive for its quarterly lease.

As the time came to make decisions for Quarter 2, so did the time to design Infinitech’s first product. The wants, needs, and prices willing to be paid by Workhorse were once again analyzed to have a better idea of what decisions should be made prior to the design process. Having decided on the decisions, Infinitech’s first product was to be a desktop given the name Novacon. With all the features included on the PC, choosing the ones that seemed fit for the demands of Workhorse, the component cost came out to $1044, but in order to make profit off the product, the sales price chosen was $1825 with a $115 rebate. Upon designing the ad for Novacon, it was entitled “True Efficiency” which would lead consumers to see how truly efficient our product was when compared to other products on the market. In addition the special deal on the desktop and some of its features were also emphasized. The cost of the ad came out to $30,000. Twenty of Novacon’s ads were placed locally in Sao Paolo with expenses for the ads coming up to $5,000 with a combined total ad costs resulting in $74,113.Following the advertising decisions were the decisions to hire sales people. Four sales people were hired for Workhorse and 1 person for service support to start off which lead to an additional $86,000 quarterly cost thus ending the decisions for Quarter 2.

When it came to see the results of the previous quarter on Quarter 3, they were far from promising. Infinitech’s PC Marketing Division’s performance based off the balanced scorecard was below average on all levels of performance giving the notion that the product and its advertising were quite unsuccessful to say the least. Not everything was a complete failure though, for on a more positive note; Infinitech was at least in 3rd place for total market shares at 18% with first place going to Galileo Computers at 26% and last going to Shark Computers at 13% . Analyzing Infinitech’s revenues and expenses, gross profit was at $-39,152 and total operating expenses came out to $330,113 resulting in a net profit of $-369,265 and a -63% sales revenue. Much work and revision for Infinitech’s next product was to be made in order to turn the losses into gains. The second PC that wasdesigned, named Centurion to let it have a more aggressive feel to it was supposed to be everything its predecessor the Novacon PC lacked and more, but it also ended up with a higher component cost of $1539. Since the Centurion model included more features than the Novacon, the sales price had to be increased to a price of $2,500 a unit with a $200 rebate. The price increase seemed to be appropriate for the included features, but this was only an assumption. Upon reviewing the advertising of Infinitech and its competitors’ products, I noticed that their ad titles simply had their brand name and not any specific type of caption such as mine which appeared to give them more success in their advertising. Noticing this, for the second attempt at advertising, I adopted my competitors’ approach and had the ad title be the brand name and proceeded to place 5 advertisements in Sao Paolo and 5 in Shanghai since a sales office was added there as well. To complete the quarter, an additional 2 sales people were added for Mercedes in Sao Paolo and Shanghai which resulted in a total of 14 sales people for Quarter 3.