Our plan of action should have been targeting Savers and Shoppers in the second half of the game in order to grow with the market size changes.

We decided this after spending three to four periods with only two products focusing on price sensitive and price insensitive groupings, which was an amalgamation of all 5 segments rather than dealing with each separately.

We later on initiated RD projects and launched new products one after another throughout the second half of the term.

While our strategy for the game changed throughout the term, overall specific elements of our strategy stayed consistent.

Comparative Analysis Given that no team had any experience understanding the relationships and the landscape of the game until a couple periods into the term, we wanted to compare what other teams were doing as well as our own past periods successes in order to evaluate and learn while we moved forward.

This element of our strategy is very important because it is our active approach towards identifying our competitors period-by-period growth, strengths, and our own flaws.

Key performance indicators we primarily considered were share value growth rate per period, market share in dollar value, quantity sold, as well as the accuracy in product features.

We believe these were important because they were fit best with our view of the game.

As such, we wanted to allocate as much of our budget into market research as we could.

While some of our periods we were low in research and had to cut down, we generally spent a good half million on market research.

Additionally, we put a lot of value and emphasis into developing new products and refining existing products as it fit into our mid-late game strategy of consumer segmentation.

Having identified that consumer preferences change and products cannot stay accurate with their target segment, we set out development goals to be more accurate.

That said, our primary RD goal was to increase our margins per product sold by finding the lowest cost ever.

We successfully developed and launched 4 products that had the lowest base cost to total cost ratios.

Therefore we prioritized a significant portion of our budget to ensure our key products always had a high advertising budget.

Given our experiments and market research reports, we identified that increasing advertising is much more effective than increasing our commercial team; there is also a risk of incurring costs of reducing the commercial team if we realize our investment was counter-productive.

That said, while we increased our number of brands, we recognized that advertising became a huge cost that we could not sustain and it was ultimately one of the key indicators that we had failed to realize a huge flaw in our strategy.

As such, we would be gaining higher margins per product sold in exchange for selling less quantity, which we found was fine because our market share in units sold may be low, but our overall revenue would be high.

Other teams such as UK-T consistently beat us in quantity sold as their key product targeted the Savers demographic, which we also had a product targeting it.

Additionally, we realized that specific changes were affecting our performance near the last few periods.

As such, we decided to increase our advertising research to 20 of our total ad spend instead of 10, which resulted in excellent message quality.

As a result, we experienced declining sales from this product while the market size continued to shrink each period.

Additionally, we launched a product into the Explorers segment not considering that it is also one of the smallest segments.

Markstrat Game How To Win