August has ended! The Ivey MBA program is almost half way through. A marathon of exams in the last week of August was followed up by the most hyped and awaited simulation exercise in the program – SABRE. It stands for “Strategic Allocation of Business Resources” which is a marketing simulation exercise that puts all the competitors in a industry head to head and fight for grabbing the maximum market share and the highest cash flow. It simulates an eight-year time frame into three days and allowed us to implement all the marketing concepts that we learned in the last 3 months. As our legendary marketing professor said, SABRE was not about dressing up and going to the ball for dancing, it was about going into the alley for fighting!!! And so we did.
As the simulation kicked off, first period decisions had to be submitted within three hours and all the teams were optimizing their products and decisions until the last minute. The decision making process eased with time due to the learning curve and a better understanding of the products in the different segments. Reports and market studies were purchased to understand their product performance in the market and also to see the effect of their decisions.
There were a lot of factors to be considered and altered when making a decision – Advertising spend for each product, Sales force numbers for the different channels and their training, R&D investment for new launches and for improving the existing product attributes and changes required for the perception shift of the products to target segments. There were some calculated risks and aggressive marketing to push new and existing products.
Our team chose to go heavy on R&D right from the start to continuously improve the product attributes as required by changing customer perceptions and each new product was launched and backed up with aggressive advertising spend and sales force to better promote the products into both markets. Each product in the portfolio was perfectly positioned in the sweet spot of the target segments and this enabled us to have more than 50% market share by the end of period eight. The end result, we ended up earning $355 Million (Sadly Virtual)
On the whole, in the great words of Roger More: “If you conceptualize something well, it should be conceptually simple”.
Ranjith earned his Bachelors degree in Nautical Technology from Mumbai University (India) and is a certified Captain in the Merchant Navy. Prior to Ivey, he sailed across the seven oceans onboard Supertankers as a Chief Officer. He wishes to leverage his experience and transition into the Transportation and Supply Chain logistics industry. At Ivey he is the Co-founder and VP of the Operations and Supply Chain Management Club, is an avid sports enthusiast and enjoys playing rugby, ultimate frisbee, softball and volleyball.