Post # 7 New Shoe Simulation

Our class has this simulation that is worth 20% of our grade called "New Shoe Simulation". It's pretty different from other simulations that I have done for St. Mikes in the past. This you are pretty much a marketing person for an athletic shoe company. The last guy was fired because he/she couldn't produce so they hired me. I have control over much more than marketing though. The simulation guide goes into detail about a home, domestic, and foreign market. I can develop my product (put money in and get a better shoe). I deigned the COMPANY logo, not just a shoe, so I pretty much created a brand.

I get to do this simulation as a group project. Very fortunately I got to choose my own team and am working with Kt Copp and Tim Nagy. We got to do 2 weeks of practice simulation. It was pretty awful the first week (in theory) because we went further in the hole. Then the 2nd week we pretty much spent no money on any product development, no money on advertising, no money on customer promotions, no money on dealer promotions, and no money on market research (those are some of the fields we have control over). This simulation then says we did awesome. The only issue I personally had with that is the first week we followed the guide to the letter and went so far into the hole! The "student guide" has money values put on each of the above mentioned categories i.e. don't spend more than 2 million on product development. We put in exactly 2 million but it only hurt us further.

We have to put our thinking caps on because the real simulation starts this week. Our goals are to develop our product quickly and get to level 2, so we can buy into the foreign market. We only start out with home and domestic market capability. We also want to just crush in our own home market, if we can boost and have a solid home market, then that will carry us through all the other markets. We aren't very focused on the domestic market. We got to read one of last semesters simulators and they didn't even get to go to the foreign market. Reading that persons numbers, we see that they could have done very well for themselves. We have 8 weeks of doing decisions and building in our markets. I think collectively we will do just fine. This is worth 20% of our grade, but the rubrics on grading shows that we have to use the tools we learn in class to make this happen. I am confident that us 3 will be able to pass this with flying colors.