The Business Strategy Game: A Reflection

The Business Strategy Game is a hands on learning exercise that will give The Students valuable decision-making practice and develop powers of business judgment. The Strategy Business Game learned all aspects such as production, distribution, sales forecasting, finance, marketing, celebrity endorsements, private label operations, corporate citizenship and lastly internet marketing.

Every students learned to makes decisions in their respective companies which is submitted before a due date in which the game “turns” one year. The next financial year shows who has met investor expectations or who is clearly the most profitable in the industry.

The Business Strategy Game is challenging exercise where students are divided into teams and assigned the task of running an athletic footwear company in head-to-head competition against companies managed by other students. Company operations parallel those of actual athletic footwear companies. Just as in the real-world, companies compete in a global market arena.

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The students learned to make decisions relating to plant operations, distribution and warehouse operations, work force compensation, online sales at the company’s web site, sales and marketing, and finance. The challenge is to craft and execute a competitive strategy that results in a respected brand image, keeps your company in contention for global market leadership, and produces good financial performance as measured by earnings per share, return on investment, stock price appreciation, and credit rating.

All aspects of The Business Strategy Game parallel the functioning of the real-world athletic footwear market, thus allowing me to think rationally and logically in deciding what to do and get valuable practice in making a variety of different business decisions under circumstances that mirror real-world competitive conditions.

The challenge for each company’s management team is to craft and execute a competitive strategy that results in a respected brand image, keeps their company in contention for global market leadership, and produces good financial performance.

All companies begin the exercise on the same footing from a global perspective-with equal sales volume, global market share, revenues, profits, costs, product quality and performance, brand recognition, and so on. The Students have wide strategic latitude in staking out a market position and improving their performance. They can

Employ a low-cost leadership strategy and pursue a competitive advantage keyed to having lower costs and selling at lower prices than rivals.

Employ a differentiation strategy that sets their company’s footwear apart from rival brands based on such attributes as a higher rating, more models/styles to select from, and such marketing attributes as more advertising, greater celebrity appeal, or higher mail-in rebates.

Employ a more value for the money strategy (providing good quality footwear at lower prices than other good quality brands) where a company’s competitive advantage is an ability to incorporate appealing attributes at a lower cost than rivals.

Focus strategic efforts on being the clear market leader in one or more market segments-wholesale sales to footwear retailers or Internet sales or private-label footwear manufacture for chain retailers.

Focus strategic efforts on one or two geographic regions (as opposed to competing in all regions).

Companies have a full range of competitive strategy options – low-cost leadership, differentiation, best-cost provider, focused low-cost, and focused differentiation. The students can pursue essentially the same strategy worldwide or craft slightly or very different strategies for the Europe-Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and North America markets. They can try to gain an edge over rivals with more advertising or a wider selection of models or more appealing styling/quality or bigger rebates or securing more appealing celebrity endorsements, and so on. They can alter their emphasis on selling their branded shoes through footwear retailers or at the company’s Web site. They can place more or less emphasis on winning bids to produce private-label footwear for chain retailers.

There’s no built-in bias favoring any one strategy, no “secret” to being the industry leader, and no “magic bullet” strategy that Students are challenged to discover in trying to out-compete their rivals. Which strategies end up delivering the best performance in any given group of rival companies that are competing head-to-head always hinge on the interplay and competitiveness of strategies that the rival companies are employing. Most any well-conceived, well-executed strategy and competitive approach is capable of succeeding, provided it is not overpowered by the strategies of competitors or defeated by the presence of too many copycat strategies that dilute its effectiveness.

All aspects of The Business Strategy Game closely mirror the competitive functioning of the real-world athletic footwear market. Cause-effect relationships and revenue-cost-profit relationships are based on sound business and economic principles. Everything about the company and industry environment has been made as realistic as possible in order to provide company co-managers with a close-to-real-life managerial experience where they can apply what they’ve learned in business school, logically decide what to do, and otherwise practice being businesslike.