Marketing

Simulation objectives:

            6ixXteen Software is one of the biggest software developer corporations around. By tradition, it has been very strong in the consumer software essentials rather than the enthusiasts. This firm launched an assault on the Anti-Spyware market five years ago. Yet over the past two years, the growth in sales had lost after such strong initial sales. As a competing firm, we have to take the existing preliminary position and build the firm as a dominant contestant in the software  development industry within ten years. This aim can be achieved when our firm has a higher cumulative net marketing contribution than other competitor (FBM E-Services). To develop marketing objectives, we should make some advantages which is relative to other competitor's position. We have to contribute to the market share, reducing the prices, providing the consumer the same quality and the lower prices. Also, to achieve our objectives we have to look for new market segments and for each market segment we must design a different marketing mix.

 

Simulation experience:

            We made some advertising decision bask in 1996-1997, according to market report, which had allocated 70% for radio and 30% for printed media. We had to change our strategies in ads to let all consumers know our products through the mass media. Because 6ixXteen Software is a market challenger,
we know FBM E-Services and its strategies and objectives. By then, we could match their effort to rise in software development. This is the obvious reason that we had to allocate additional advertising budgets at the beginning. During 1998-1999, after dissatisfied results, we made a decision to cut down the retail price.  We also had to keep all the retail outlets active, which were mainly Cyber departments in Department stores and Discount stores. We brought the price range report of industry overview. Considering 6ixXteen Software’s experiences in initial growth, there has been a decrease in gross margin despite the forecast that expected it to go up. In 2000-2002, when sales and profits decline, we had to change some marketing strategies to increase the profits and the sales as well. We launched the ZeroSpyware and the base budget has been automatically increased by 10,000,000 to fund the launch campaign. To introduce our new product, we had adopted a high quality, price, promotion and distribution. Therefore, we condensed our previous product offering, cut the promotion budget and drop the price down because it was obsolete. We then progressed to offer the new product with some new marketing strategy.

 

Conclusion:
            I have learned a lot in this experience. Every marketing strategist must know that there are still lots of things to learn in the market. Despite everyday transactions, simple knowledge thought in school is still not enough. We still have to learn the real stuff.

            In doing business, one must be adept to all possibilities because it is through taking risks that we learn. Without failing, how would we learn? It’s a jungle ut there!

            We must look for ways to always innovate. Develop, for the benefit of everybody. New ways in marketing would demand a lot of effort to let the consumer accept your product. As a foremost experience, this is a great deal for mew to learn this type of marketing strategies. There are still lots of useful strategies and despite disappointing results, we learn year by year.

I think, 6ixXteen Software must use at least one competitive marketing strategy and focuses on developing more software so to avoid the problem of losing revenues and thus, gain more profits in the ahead.