Erie team

Answer question 2,3

1. Quickly restate in a brief paragraph what your team is trying to achieve from a strategic perspective? We as a group realized quickly that we could not strategize for the short term goals; furthermore, we needed to focus on the longevity of our company and the long-term success of the business. In the beginning, we prioritized the differentiation strategy by raising the prices of our product which gave us some issues early on. We realized that our product line has to earn customer loyalty because of its uniqueness; however, we had not proved this at the start of our company which caused us to take out an emergency loan due to lack of sales and too much inventory left over. Our strategy now is definitely lowering the prices within the target range to gain back customer loyalty and begin to sell our inventory at a higher rate. We hope by doing this more customers will begin buying the product again and we can begin to slowly raise prices as we gain more customer loyalty.

2. How is your company performing in the simulation? What metrics are you using to assess that performance?

3. What has gone well for you?

What has not worked so well for you? The biggest problem we have encountered as a group is raising our prices too quickly from the beginning of the simulation. This has caused us to be in a bind from the start and having to play catch up with the other groups who used a more effective strategy. Because of our high prices and lack of customer loyalty, we were struggling to sell a high rate of inventory and this caused us to even take out an emergency loan to stay afloat. However, we feel very optimistic about the future of the company as we lower prices and play the long game by lowering the prices to obtain high sales and slowly raise the price as customers increase.

What has happened that you weren’t anticipating? These could be things within your industry, moves by competitors, or changes in consumer preferences?

At this stage, are you going to attempt to change your strategy or tweak it? If so, how and why? We are definitely tweaking our strategy at the mid-point of the simulation because we realize the crisis we are in as a company. Although we are fully confident in the differentiation strategy for the future, we know right now that it is crucial to lower the prices in order to sell more inventory and accumulate more revenue. Once this consistently proves successful, we feel that we can embrace our differentiation strategy by slowly raising the price of the product because of our proven unique product line.

Are you going to stick with the same strategy moving forward or are you going to change? If you plan to change your company strategy, how and what are you going to do?

How is your team (the team members) performing? We feel that our group definitely had a slow start and lacked communication; however, we feel now that our cohesiveness is at an all-time high and we are on the same page in the steps we need to take to fulfill our vision as a company and make it the success we know it can be. Understanding our group members’ different strengths and weaknesses in context to the simulation has been key to our change of mindset and ability to adapt to a new approach moving forward. Each group member is understanding of their role and feel that our best is yet to come as a company.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your team?