Strategic marketing simulation reflection
I was so struggling with making strategies about how to increase the profit margin. It was challenging because it could not be solved by simply offering more discounts to increase the unit sales, or by increasing the motor's price to receive high revenues. Besides those factors, the change of profit margin also involved the spending on features and the strength of sales force. Any one of them changed could lead to a significant difference in the change of profit margin. As the result that my profit margin experienced a big fall due to some bad strategic decisions. Before further explaining the reasons, I would like to draw some interest findings and the corresponding marketing strategies that I …show more content…
Before attempting simulation, I used to regard customer satisfaction was strongly related to the sales force deployment as I thought the more effort put on sales force the higher customer satisfaction would reach. In term of this point, I would like to give two specific examples to prove my previous thinking was not quite appropriate. One successful example was that the customer satisfaction of segment B was increased to ‘satisfied level’ by enhancing the sales force, as the representative of segment B was dissatisfied with the slow sales responses. However, increasing the sales force would not always increase the customer satisfaction level. I failed to satisfy the customer from segment D since they complained that ‘too much repetitive offering about motor’s features’. The important failure was that I ignored their real need. The segment D customer was very sensitive to the price change instead of sales force. The correct action I should have taken was to offer more discounts to get them more satisfied. Customer satisfaction is crucial for marketing decision making, but the more important point is that we should get to know well about what the customers really need or what they are unsatisfied with.
Since the result for the early stage of the simulation was quite good as the market share was consistently increasing over the first 4 quarters, I decided to be more risky to achieve a higher