Initial Team Strategy Assignment

Initial Team Strategy

Your goal in Music2Go is to achieve the highest Total Marketing Contribution (TMC) in your World by the end of the Multi-Player simulation.

To do this, you must create a Strategic Marketing plan for your Music2Go firm. This plan will be the basis of what you intend your firm to achieve over the next 8 years in the Multi-Player version. It should be marketing focused, and detailed enough that you have a clear picture of how you intend to achieve the goal of highest TMC in your World. Remember, your marketing plan is a roadmap for how you plan to accomplish your goals - you need to spell out the specific strategies/tactics you will use within each market segment each year. As mentioned in class, the strategies that proved successful in single-player might or might not prove to be successful in multi-player. Having five competitors, controlled by your classmates rather than a computer program, completely changes things.

Please realize that this is your plan for how to be successful - your first round of decisions should follow directly from this specified plan. As your team’s situation evolves however, you might need to adjust your strategy in order to be competitive - you are not required to stick to this plan once the simulation has started to progress.

For this assignment you are required to:

1. Briefly describe the Standard, Sports, and Youth market segments including:

• How sensitive each segment is to Price, Advertising, Distribution, and Product Development.
• Projected Market Size in units.
• Price Range (min / max).
• Which Media Channels are most important for each Market Segment? (hint: do not just focus on % that consumes a particular media - you also need to consider the relative cost of each media in order to be effective)
• What changes (if any) do you predict for these market segments in the future?

1. Create a Strategic Marketing Plan: Based on what you know about the various target segments, write a Strategic Marketing Plan that will allow your firm to achieve the highest Total Marketing Contribution (TMC) in your World over the next 8 years (decision periods). You will NOT be including a SWOT for the Initial Team Strategy report as all firms in the simulation start off in exactly the same position.

This should be specific and detailed such that your reader can fairly easily figure out your planned actions on a yearly basis. You should at least discuss the following:

1. Which Market Segments you intend to enter and when? What will your overall Product Strategy be for each segment (you will likely have a different overall strategy for the various segments) - e.g. do you intend to be a high volume / low cost manufacturer, a lower volume / higher margin manufacturer, etc…?

1. Standard
2. Youth
3. Sport

1. Outline specific tactics and changes in tactics planned over the next 8 years to maximize Total Marketing Contribution. For example, think about things such as:

1. How will you achieve your overall product strategy for each segment?

1. How many products will you offer and when will you introduce them?
2. How often/when will you make cost reduction investments?
3. How often/when will you make spec improvement investments?
4. How/when will you adjust your pricing strategy?

1. How will you manage your retail margins for each product to encourage distributors to stock your products (Distribution Strategy)?
2. How will you use advertising and sales promotion for each product to accomplish your goals?

1. What budget do you intend to have for each in each year? How will you allocate that budget each year?

1. How/when will you use marketing research?
2. Any other useful or relevant information.

Note - you will be able to launch a new product each year starting from the third year onwards (up to a maximum of 6 products by Year 8). However, you should think carefully about how many products you wish to have, as each new product requires a significant cash investment and ongoing costs. You have a fixed Marketing Budget each year, so it is easy to stretch this budget too thinly if some of your products are not successful.

While there is no maximum or minimum page requirement, this assignment should be approximately 4-6 pages single spaced, however you are welcome to use double-space (which of course will increase your total number of pages). To complete this, you will need to consult your Industry Benchmark Report, Marketing Budget report, Market Information report, the Market Research reports, and the Music2Go Player’s Manual however you might find other reports useful to use as well (make sure to cite these, and any other reports you use, using MLA format in-text citations, whenever you use them, and include a Works Cited). See Appendix A below for helpful information on doing this properly with the various Smartsims reports and manuals. You will lose points for not using MLA format in-text citations and providing an MLA format Works Cited. Remember, if you are directly quoting something, you must put quote marks around it and include an in-text citation – if you do not, you are plagiarizing. If you are paraphrasing, you do not need quote marks but still must include an in-text citation.

You can use bullets, tables, etc. Always consider your reader and present your report in a way that is organized, easy to understand, and free of spelling and grammatical errors. Do not simply say things like “we’ll do it how the manual recommends” - you need to specifically spell out your strategy/tactics for your reader.

One person from your team will submit your Initial Marketing Strategy to turnitin.com by 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 10th. You will not be submitting a hard copy. The title of your submitted report should include your World number and Team number (which is contained in the spreadsheet in Courseweb). Further details of how to submit to turnitin.com will be provided. Make sure that multiple people on your team have access to your final copy and can submit it by the deadline should any issues arise with the person who your team initially decides will submit the assignment for your team.