Georgiy Soltanov

MGT-499
BSG Essay

The business strategy game was a great experience for me before going into the real

world. There were many things that related to the chapters we went through in class. However,

there were also things that may not have really related to the information presented in class. For

our group the biggest thing that let us succeed in this game was experience that we gained during

the practice run and even up until that final week. Another big contributor was learning of other

groups mistakes or successes. The combination of gathering different experience I believe is

what ultimately led to our success. The information learned in class definitely assisted our

decision making however, a lot of the concepts we learned in class, applied to our decisions in a

natural almost subconscious way.

When it came to the leadership in the group, we didn’t really have either perspectives of

leadership that were discussed in chapter one. We didn’t blame external forces for our success or

failures, nor did we put all the responsibility on the leader. We more or less made the decisions

together but just had the CEO of that week have the final say. Our group used strategic

management when going through a mental checklist of what we wanted to accomplish with this

project. When going through this checklist we put focus into a competitive advantage that we

could have. Our competitive advantage did switch throughout the course of the game, however

the main advantage that helped us succeed was our marketing. We put a lot of our focus and

budget into making sure that our marketing was above the rest of the competition.

When planning out the game, in the beginning we focused on setting ourselves up for the

future. We knew that at the start we would be far behind everyone but that is because we

invested a lot into marketing, equipment, inventory...etc. We had a long-term strategy but also

made short-term decisions to keep our company afloat. When first starting the game until the last
 Georgiy Soltanov
MGT-499
week, our teams intended strategy did not last long before being altered. We began with just

trying to make as much profit as possible by creating a cheap shoe and selling it for a hefty price

and not satisfying our workers needs in order to help us save more money. This led to a quick

plummet of our rating and stock price. We had to alter this strategy dramatically to whereby the

end we had some of the best worker benefits and made some of the highest quality shoes. We

noticed that upholding a social responsibility by giving good benefits to our workers helped us

out in the long run.

When using the external environment to give us the edge, we focused closely on what the

group at the top was doing as well as the group at the bottom. Typically, we found that those

groups would be using two completely different strategies. We found that the groups at the top

were making pretty high-quality shoes and selling them at a high price, in other words, a

premium product. The groups at the bottom had a strategy of just selling quantity over quality.

We found that the group that was at the top from week one, stayed at the top for the remainder of

the game, only making slight tweaks here and there.

To go along with the external environment, we followed our strategy closely to see which

country was most interested with our sneaker. We found that Latin America was giving us the

best results in the beginning, but we soon after noticed North America requiring more investment

and that’s what we did with our inventory and marketing.

For our value-chain analysis, we never really focused on strategizing it but looking back

on it, we did put focus into giving benefits to our factory workers and providing a quality shoe at

a fairly affordable price to the consumers. For our primary activities we focused on figuring out

where most of our production should take place. We took several factors into the decision. One,

where it would be cheapest, while still providing good benefits to the workers. Two, where is
 Georgiy Soltanov
MGT-499
most demand coming from so that it would be less expensive when taking global shipping out of

the picture. We found that although it is cheapest to create a good quality shoe in our Asia-

Pacific facility, we still had to create shoes in the Latin America and North American facilities

when taking shipping into account. We still did create most of our inventory in the Asia-Pacific

facility, however. We did not create any inventory in the Europe-Africa facility since it was far

too expensive and the demand for the shoes in that continent just weren’t high enough. The

warehouses we used to store most of our inventory was the North America warehouse since that

is where most of our sales were coming from.

Our marketing was the thing we tried to focus on most. Our reasoning was that we could

outsell the competition by over-powering them in the marketing department. Our marketing

efforts went mainly towards Latin America and North America since we already had a strong

customer base there, we figured that expanding an already strong customer base would be more

beneficial, efficient and less expensive than going into a territory we were not as well recognized

in. We also invested in celebrities to try to raise credibility of our company and to help us sell

more all around. We focused on trying to win the celebrities that were all around powerful

figures in all the continents and not just one. Since we put a lot into marketing, we knew we

could have a higher price tag than most of our competition. Even then, in order to try to pass the

leading group we focused on under-cutting their shoe price by a little so that we could outsell

them.

We tried to be efficient with our spending and would save money where we can and

where it would not really affect the product quality. One place where we were able to do that is

buying used equipment for our production facilities rather than brand new ones. This saved us a

great deal of money which then reflected in our shoe price since we were able to keep the
 Georgiy Soltanov
MGT-499
product price down. As stated previously, by creating inventory in specific continents and

holding the inventory in other continents where we had most of our sales coming from, we were

able to save money on shipping and the actual production cost.

To sum it up, our strategy was to focus on marketing heavily, follow the leading

competition and undercutting them on price. We also invested heavily in production, inventory,

equipment in the beginning in order to reap the rewards in the later years of the company. We

learned a lot from our mistakes in the beginning such as the importance of adequately benefiting

the workers and not undermining the quality of the product. I believe that the strategy we ended

off with is the winning strategy since it is what helped us shoot up from dead last to second

place. If we had a couple more years of simulation, I know that this strategy would have brought

us into first place.