A Marketing Simulation

Click your left mouse button to learn more about this exciting new simulation

What is music2go?

The companion simulation to “Marketing” 13th Edition

Etzel, Walker, Stanton & Pandit

Students compete, individually or in teams, to make their company successful in a challenging simulation of consumer electronics marketing based on the US portable CD player market.

With the aid of industry information and a substantial suite of detailed reports they make decisions relating to all four areas in the marketing mix

• Product design

• Pricing

• Promotion

• Place (Distribution)

Students get “hands on” experience at making critical decisions and seeing the outcome in a live, interactive case study.

m2g Single-Player or Multi-Player

In the Single-Player simulation students compete alone against a computer opponent.

within ..

2 consumer market segments

• Standard

• Youth

within ..

3 consumer market segments

• Standard

• Youth

• Sports

In the Multi-Player simulation students compete in teams, running identical firms against each other live, via the internet.

Single-PlayerMulti-Player

Click your left mouse button to progress through the Single-Player demo

When music2go starts you will be able to see the Select Firm Name screen.

This is your opportunity to change the name of your firm. After the first decision period (one year) you can not change your firm name again.

The second decision tree item is the Year Ahead.

The first page of the report is a news update on the scenario, explaining what it is that you should be trying to achieve in music2go.

Pushing the right arrow takes you to the next page.

The Strategic Marketing Planning report gives you a reminder of the key steps involved in constructing a marketing plan and chapter references for the Marketing textbook.

Finally the Forecast Marketing Budget Expenditure report shows you how much you spent last year and how much you currently have available to spend this year.

As you make decisions this report will update to show you how much budget you still have available to spend. This report is repeated in Forecast Results

The Industry Overview gives you reports detailing what is happening in the m2g industry.

The first page of this report is a summary of the key results and an explanation of what the other reports are.

In m2g Single-Player you are competing against EWS Audio and they start in a stronger market position than you do.

Pushing the down arrow allows you to select any of the Industry Overview reports without having to scroll through one by one.

For example if we select the Market Share report. We will jump to that report.

The Market Share report clearly shows that EWS Audio is the dominant firm in the market.

Firm Results gives you reports detailing the financial performance of your firm.

The first page of this report is a summary of the key results and an explanation of what the other reports are.

Here you can see that your firm is failing to meet its sales forecasts.

We will investigate the failure to meet forecasts further by jumping to the Net Marketing Contribution report.

The Net Marketing Contribution Report compares our forecast with our actual result.

From this particular report you can see that the main problem was that we failed to reach our sales goals.

The purchase Market Research decision screen is still being worked on for the Fall release of m2g.

Students will have the opportunity to buy a selection of market research reports from two separate companies of varying quality and cost.

To ensure that you can still play this pre-release version of m2g we have included a market summary report on the second page.

The All Product Details market summary report shown below gives you key information about the effectiveness of your promotional campaigns in comparison to your competitor.

Note that EWS Audio is the only firm with a product in the Youth market segment.

Product Management gives you reports detailing the performance of your products.

The first page of this report is a summary of the key results and an explanation of what the other reports are.

Here you can see that actual sales of your Sonic product were approx 60% of your sales forecast.

Highlight the Product Development tree item and then click the + sign to list all of your products below it.

The Product Development tree item gives you reports that detail the design characteristics and performance of your products.

Clicking your Sonic product will open its product development decision screen

Here you can choose to continue with the current design, update it (with a new design from below), or abandon it.

Highlight the Price tree item and then click the + sign to list all of your products below it.

The Price tree item gives you reports that give market information relating to pricing and retailer margins.

Clicking your Sonic product will open its pricing decision screen

Here you can set your product’s retail price and retail margin. You can also set your sales forecast for each retail channel that you choose to supply it to.

Highlight the Advertising tree item and then click the + sign to list all of your products below it.

The Advertising tree item gives you reports that give market information relating to advertising.

Clicking Product Strategy and Allocation will open the Product Advertising Budgets decision screen

Here you can set your product Advertising strategies and budgets. If you select a set strategy such as growth then the computer will automatically allocate your budget to the various media types.

Clicking your Sonic product will allow you to evaluate the media allocation of the advertising strategy that you have chosen.

Here you can change to a custom advertising strategy by setting your product’s media allocation yourself.

Here you can change to a custom advertising strategy by deciding how to split your advertising budget between the various radio station formats.

Selecting one of the media tabs opens its sub-category allocation decision screen. E.g. Radio and different types of radio station formats.

Highlight the Sales Promotion tree item and then click the + sign to list all of your products below it.

The Sales Promotion tree item gives you reports that give market information relating to sales promotion.

Clicking Product Strategy and Allocation will open the product Sales Promotion Budgets decision screen

Here you can set your product Sales Promotion strategies and budgets. If you select a set strategy such as growth then the computer will automatically allocate your budget to the various sales promotion activities

Clicking your Sonic product will allow you to evaluate the sales promotion activity budgets of the sales promotion strategy that you have chosen.

Here you can change to a custom sales promotion strategy by deciding how to split your budget between the various sales promotion activities available.

The Product Management tree item gives you reports detailing the performance of your products.

The first page of this report is a summary of the key results and an explanation of what the other reports are.

Clicking Sales Force Management will open its decision screen.

Here you can make your Sales Force Management decision for each retail channel. You need to decide how many sales reps to employ and how much their salary package will be for each retail channel, e.g. consumer electronics.

Clicking Inventory Management will open its decision screen.

Here you must decide how much inventory you want for each of your products. If you believe your sales forecasts are accurate then take your forecast sales units, subtract your existing inventory and order the difference leaving an expected closing inventory of zero.

The Forecast Results tree item gives you reports detailing the forecast financial performance of your firm for next year based on the decisions that you have entered.

The first page of this report is a summary of the key results and an explanation of what the other reports are.

You should always check your Budget Expenditure report before processing your decisions

The Forecast Marketing Budget Expenditure report shows you how much you spent last year and how much you currently have available to spend this year.

As you make decisions this report will update to show you how much budget you still have available to spend.

DECISION TIME

Now that you have had a tour of the decisions and reports available it is time to show you a sample decision

Clicking your Sonic product will open its pricing decision screen

We will start by checking how many of each product actually sold in each retail channel last year. Rounding to the nearest 100K the answers are 600K, 500K and 500K.

We will now update our sales forecast for each retail channel with our rounded estimates based on last year’s sales.

We save our changes by pushing the apply button.

Clicking Inventory Management will open its decision screen.

We now decide to order 1,600,000 units which is the exact amount of our sales forecast. This leaves some safety stock in case we have underestimated demand.

We decide to check our forecast results based on our changed sales forecast and inventory order.

After seeing that we are forecast to improve sales by 5% and Net Marketing Contribution by 9% we decide to rollover (process) our decision.

Pushing the Rollover button closes the decision screens and brings up the screen below.

Pushing OK will process our decision, pushing cancel takes us back to the decision screens.

After the rollover we decide to check our results.

Unfortunately our sales decreased by 10% instead of our forecast 5% growth and Net Marketing Contribution decreased 21% instead of our forecast 8% growth.

Opening up the Product Development tree item we see that we now have the option to launch another product.

However we decide to rollback to the previous year to try changing more marketing decisions.

Pushing the Rollback button closes the decision screens and brings up the screen below.

Pushing OK will process our decision to rollback to last year, pushing cancel takes us back to this year’s decision screens.

Now try playing m2g yourself. The first time you play it is best to take 15 to 30 minutes to go through all of the screens that you have just been shown so that you learn what information you have available to you.

We also suggest only making a few decisions to begin with and then rolling forward to see the effects and then rolling back to improve them.

This incremental approach will allow you to quickly gain an understanding of the underlying m2g simulation model and its sensitivities.

A Marketing Simulation