StratSim Simulation Assessment: Firm A

Team Members: Timothy McKinney, Alesh Shah, Sami Belbase, Brian Muirhead, Kayleigh Ballantyne

Initial Marketing Strategy

For our initial strategy we wanted to choose a product line that would be most intriguing to customers in this poor economy. To initiate this we focused our products around better gas mileage, safety, and quality. In order to do this we needed to evaluate consumers’ needs and desires when making a high involvement purchase such as a car. We believe the best target market for this type of car would be a middle class family that does not have as much disposable income due to the recession in our economy.

After choosing key characteristics that we believed would make our cars more desirable than the competition, we took an economic approach to our marketing strategy. Our team knew that are best chance to gain more market share would be to go allocate our focus toward a high gas mileage car that does not eat into the pockets of the consumer. With this strategy, middle class families would be able to afford a quality car that did not impair their ability to buy other necessary goods. With this approach our cars would have an advantage in this target market over prestige priced competitors who focus more on luxury then affordability. We believed as a company we could not compete with highly established luxury brands in this market such as BMW, Audi, Lexus, and Mercedes. This leads us to believe that gaining share in that type of market would be an unrealistic goal as an unidentifiable company. Instead we looked at the recent trends in the current car market and saw how companies such as, Honda, Toyota, and Volkswagen, were all making substantial pushes with their new economy line of products.

After taking all of these aspects into account we believed that our marketing strategy