2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

week semester, the author is able to comfortably
schedule and play eight simulated “years” in class,
one each week, after spending about three weeks
on orienting students using game-related
presentations placed in the WebCT site for the
class. The first four game years are played at Level
1 and the next four at Level 2 which requires an
expanded set of decisions.
The author distributes results to each team via their
private WebCT (Discussion Area) folder by the next
day. In addition to the six market research reports
specified in the game book, the author makes up
additional market research information to enable the
teams to make a very comprehensive analysis of
their competitors’ performance, if they choose to.
The author prefers to see how well the teams make
use of all Market Research information (as opposed
to whether they buy and use some information), and
hence MR is provided free of cost. The results,
however, have been mixed.
Yearly budget shortfalls (compared to the best
performing team) are required to make up by
depleting a $1 million reserve fund available to each
team at the beginning of Year 1.
The game is graded each year by averaging two 0-
100 index numbers for (1) $ Gross Margin, which
measures effectiveness, and (2) $ Net Contribution,
which measures efficiency. The author typically also
varies the weights for the performance in different
years and incorporates subjective criteria, to soften
the sometimes brutal impact of the objective game
performance criteria on course grade. This
recognizes the role of luck in the game, which is a
class assignment, not the real market place!
CUSTOM RESOURCES FOR THE CLASS
The author provides custom Excel workbooks for all
case analyses. These differ from canned Excel
templates by requiring students to first hunt for and
input relevant case data and then write their own
formulae for obtaining the correct answers that
match the clues on the worksheet.
The author has also built three custom game
resources that did not come with the book. The
GreenYellowPinkBlue.xls workbook (named for the
27
color paper used when the analysis used to be done
by hand, instead of Excel) helps student teams
extrapolate forecast demand and production
quantity, do the breakeven analysis of last year’s
company performance and allocate and spend their
budget for the upcoming year, while examining
alternative breakeven scenarios. The second
custom game resource is the Diagnostic Analysis
(DA). This takes students through a “what happened
and why” detailed diagnosis of the just concluded
year. The third custom resource is the “Jumbo”
game worksheet that accumulates key input and
output data year after year. In the past, this
completed industry worksheet has provided the data
for end-of-semester game presentations by the
teams and/or the author.
The author has found that typically, in each
semester, there are at least two “winners” in an
industry out of the four companies. Sometimes, all
four do quite well, by flanking rather than going
head- to-head with competition in the same
segments and cutting each other’s throats.
STUDENT FEEDBACK ABOUT THE CLASS
Student feedback has been collected since the early
1990s, in various formats. The evidence, especially
for the case analyses and the game, is clearly
positive. Future plans for this course include web
implementation, 60 percent online and 40 percent
face-to-face.
SUMMARY
The MEA 2008 special session describes a different
way of teaching the undergraduate Marketing
Capstone Case Course. By combining a dynamic
marketing simulation game with traditional case
analyses, students are exposed to making as well as
implementing decisions. The intensely competitive
environment of the game seems to add a lot to the
class experience. Student feedback about this
format of the course has been overwhelmingly
positive and the author strongly recommends it.
Complete details of the approach will be made
available to colleagues who wish to use the same
approach.