Music2go Report

Executive Summary

The objective of this report is to provide explanations and analysis on our decisions made throughout the journey of the Music2Go Simulation Game, using marketing frameworks as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches. We would also share our key lessons learnt at the end of the report and provide suggestions on what the new management team should focus on.

From 2014 to 2018, our company Delta introduced 2 products: Sonic4 (standard segment) and SwiftSports (sports segment) in the MP3 player market. Although our goal is to become the market leader, we failed to achieve it due to conservative marketing strategy, inaccurate market forecast and insufficient resources to raise brand awareness. However, we tried to improve our total marketing contribution from trial and error. Our marketing developments could be summarized into the 2 main phases below.

1. Analyzer – exploring the market: In the first year, we were trying to understand the market situation and competition before we formulate our long-term marketing strategies. We are trying to avoid excessive risks and focus our promotion on Sonic4 as a low price product with standard segment as our primary target and sports segment as our secondary target. In the second year, we launched “SwiftSports” which specifically target the sports segment. We invested to improve the product specifications and lower the costs in the hope of outperforming the competition on the basis of quality and low price.
2. Defender – protecting market share: In the third and fourth year, we realized that a huge gap has been developed between us and our competitors. As the negative impact of our conservative marketing strategies in the earlier years has accumulated, it was difficult for us to achieve our goal to become the market leader. Therefore, instead of launching one more new product, we reacted to the situation by allocating all our resources to retain customers and tried to seek growth using our existing products by advertising heavily and promoting proactively among the sales force.

Currently at the 5th year, we are the smallest market player with market share of around 8%. As our marketing budget is much less than the other market players, our aim is to retain our existing market share and try to maximize the marketing contribution as much as possible. We hope to leave the new management with sufficient resources so that they could formulate a strategy to expand our market share and hence improve our company performance.