Last week was spent focusing on creating a marketing plan for Allstar for periods 3-7 in Pharmasim. This week then spent implementing that plan. Kind of.
I ended my posting last week making it clear that flexibility is needed and that going into this process and being willing to stray from the plan would be necessary. While the plan was adhered to relatively well, especially in the early going, making changes did prove to be necessary.
Getting restarted with the simulation, I was expecting continued success with the Allround product. After advancing through a couple more periods, I quickly found that to be much more challenging when we began focusing a great deal of attention on the new product, Allround+. It did not seem like much of our budget was being reallocated to the new product, but it sure made a big difference as the unit sales and profit began to plummet. It was rather dissatisfying to see our product go from being rated as a Star to being in the Dog category. Typically I'm a big fan of canines but not in this instance.
One result that was particularly shocking to me was in regards to pricing. As our products our based on quality and we went into the plan with a price skimming strategy, we always had the intent of being a relatively high priced product. I was surprised to see how little prices increased through the periods, and also how inflation rates were not rising nearly as quickly as before. As a result, our prices became too high and problematic for consumers. This was not something I was anticipating and called for an adjustment in our thinking.
One rather pleasant surprise was the success of Allround+. While it got off to a slow start, more than likely due to our poor initial backing of our new product, Allround+ came together and quickly began earning more and more market share and adding to our contribution after marketing. It was very important in keeping Allstar moving forward while our original Allround was beginning to decline.
What was not as shocking to me to see in hindsight was the failure of Allright. I think I glorified the market attractiveness of both the cough and allergy markets among all households in Pharmasim, especially the allergy market. Both ended up being much tougher to enter and establish than anticipated. This was proven when Allround+ had much poorer results in its initial period. When we found that Allright had a negative impact on contribution after marketing, I was not too shocked and felt right away that we should pull the product and bring more focus back to Allround.
The one mind boggler that I still can't seem to personally figure out, and our team as a whole is struggling with, is in regards to the sales force. No matter what adjustments we make we never seem to curb our problems there. This last period, I took the approach of matching Sales Force personnel as identical as possible to the respective share of each channel based on percentages. This effort also failed, just as the rest of our attempts have. After each attempt at reallocating as been unsuccessful, I'm left with the temporary conclusion that we just need to add sales force into every channel until the prompts disappear. Of course there's no money in the budget for this solution to be practical.
Planning was a very long, thought provoking process. After such an effort to plan for periods 3-7, it is rather annoying to see so much changing needing to be done. This just goes to show the importance of gathering information beforehand, analyzing it well, and determining to the best of your ability the potential outcomes. Clearly, the more accurate your predictions are, the more effective your plan will be, and the less you will need to stray from that plan.
After much thought and research I've reached my final conclusion: I plan on planning better next time.
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