The development of our strategy was borne from our hazy initial efforts. Our growing familiarization with the game came with closely studying the magnitude of various decisions, and led us to a systematically erratic strategy. The screens that bore the brunt of most of these weekly decisions were the ‘Internet Marketing’ and ‘Wholesale Marketing’ decision screen. These two screens seemed to have had the greatest positive and negative effects on the firms scoring measures. The measures we took particular notice of were the trident ‘Earnings Per Share’, ‘Return on Equity’, and ‘Credit Rating’. Perhaps the reasoning being the positioning of these measurements as opposed to those displaying revenue, profit and cash growth. Another reason could be our propensity to make decisions with the investors’ interests at the forefront. Towards the latter stages of the simulation we began to get involved in private label manufacturing as well as celebrity bids. The involvement may not have been as intensive as we would have liked, but we would boil this down to a lack of true understanding of the implication, including the rewards, of those two decisions. We began to fall into a comfort zone with surefire decisions we knew would produce results. These decisions are the aforementioned marketing screens. We learned early in the game that planning a set strategy for our company to exercise might not have necessarily worked, since successes and shortfalls would also largely be dependent on the weekly decisions that other firms in the industry made. Our goal from the beginning was to maximize shareholder profits. In doing so, we started off with relatively low Internet and mid-range wholesale shoe prices. We also made efforts to boost our image rating with a stable Corporate Social Responsibility and Citizenship budget of a little over $8 million. We never achieved the highest image rating, but we found that dedicating more funds on this page decreased our EPS more than we were willing to allow. We held off at first on celebrity bids, however, we knew we would be behind the curve if we continued. Our plan was to allocate enough for celebrity endorsement contracts that would allow us to secure one or two celebrities per year while ensuring a sufficient return. Our strategy for the remainder of our decisions involved evaluating all of the Competitive Intelligence Reports as a basis for trial-and-error inputs. We stayed away from any decisions that would require us to take out a loan and aimed to increase yearly profits with each week.
Through making a number of various business decisions each week, we learned even some seemingly small decisions could have important implications. The continuous balancing act of maintaining, and even exceeding, investor expectations as well as achieving a superior image rating was difficult. Considering this was only a simulation, one could empathize with many corporations who have all of these factors and many more depending on every decision they make. For example, we decided to use superior material in the North American market, but decided to significantly reduce this quality in the Asian market. Decisions like this in the real world could have negative implications on the company image. Imagine the media reaction that would occur if Americans found out that there was a major trend of unreliable, low quality shoes being produced in Asia. Our North American consumers could possibly be turned away from our product in fear that it would produce the same negative results as in Asia? Would we tell them that their product was superior to those in Asia? How would the Asian market react to this news? These are retrospective thoughts and questions we came across towards the end of the simulation.