Country Manager Simulation

vThe country manager simulation let us learn how to be a manager for a company expanding internationally. These are five things that I learnt during the simulation:
• Benchmarking is not always true
When we enter a new market, benchmarking will be useful for us to give the idea how to make a decision by learning the competitors design their marketing plan. However, in this simulation, I realize that not all of the competitors did is the right thing. For example, we always looked at the promotion budget and the sales force allocation of a competitor who got the biggest market share in the market and tried to spend the same or more money compared to them. However, when we played the game, the result was disappointing. We did not get the result as we expect, even after we played several periods. Number of stores that carried our product was still low. As a result, we got negative contribution. Then, we decided to cut the budget and allocate the sales force based on total number of stores in the market. The result was shocking because we got better result after we cut the budget. Thus, we realize that benchmarking is not always true. We still have to make a decision by analyzing data that we have instead of completely relying on what competitors did.
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Having all the information was really helpful for us during the simulation. As long as we can find the perfect metrics to do the analysis, we can make the right decision and obtain a satisfactory result. Thus, gathering all of the related information before making decision is