Brand Management Microworld

Initial conditions

Teams are the managers of a brand with a potential market of 5 million consumers and 50,000 stores. There is an initial budget within which they must accomplish the entire product launch.

The simulation runs over 12 years, with monthly decisions, although useful learning exercises may run over just a few simulated years. Decisions can be set to repeat over a number of periods automatically.

Objectives

Grow the brand profitably in a large but finite market, making decisions that build consumers’ interest, extend product availability by ensuring that stores will benefit from sufficient demand and margin.

Setup

The simulation can be started with different levels of launch budget – the default value is generous, and teams will discover there is a minimum level of total spending, below which no launch is possible.

Feature List
Decisions	Three decisions: Monthly advertising spend, Size of sales force and Wholesale price [retail stores add a fixed mark-up to determine the retail price to consumers] Teams choose when to run forward and the simulation runs forward one month with each step, or teams can choose to repeat decisions over several months.
"Go Back" option	A 'Go back' option allows previous decisions to be revised an alternative strategies explored.
Challenges	Three challenges included - part played scenarios that provide different situations for students to work with. The "Greedy" challenge is also supported by a spreadsheet / paper based exercise.
Save new challenges	Teams can save the game at any point, to explore alternative strategies. Instructors can create new challenges by running the game with their own decisions, then saving and distributing the game to teams
Resource map	A ‘Resource Map’ of the brand architecture shows inter-relationships between 12 key measures.
Reports	Four numerical reports showing relevant financial and operational data.
Graphs	Twenty graphs showing the history of key data items.
Table data	Three tables showing entire history of financial and service data.
Save Comments with games	When saving games can add comments: this makes it easy to create new scenarios for students.
Table of User Decisions	Makes it easy to keep track of your actions.
Table of all public variables	Analysis of game results is made easy with this additional feature. Results are presented in the same order as the reports / tables but on copying to Excel or similar spreadsheet can be re-ordered to enable straightforward analysis.
Copy to other applications	Images of all Reports, Graphs and Tables can be copied into other applications for inclusion in documents and slide presentations produced. All game data can be copied from the tables into spreadsheets for further analysis.
Custom Graphs	Any item appearing in a table can be represented as a graph - simply double click on the table heading.
Teachers materials	Site License materials include the user’s guide as well as instructor’s slides and slide notes.