Guide
You're launching a brand against two competitors. Each period you set a price and decide how much to spend on quality and on advertising — and customers choose between the three of you on price, quality, and awareness, in proportions this market keeps to itself. Finish with the most company value — cash plus the worth of the customers you've won — after 20 periods to win. The last section spells out how the game maps onto the marketing mix.
Starting a game
Every company starts level: $5,000 in cash, a price near $20, and quality and awareness scores of 25 each. Each game's market is drawn from its seed — leave it blank for a new one, or replay a seed to face exactly the same market again.
Reading the board
The table shows every company's current price, quality and awareness scores, cash, and share of last period's market. Your row is highlighted; each rival is labeled with its strategy. Below it is your decision form for the coming period.
Your three levers
- Price
- What you charge per unit, between $10 and $60. It carries over from period to period until you change it.
- Quality spend
- Raises your quality score. Each dollar adds less than the last: the gain is 1.5 × the square root of what you spend that period.
- Ad spend
- Raises your awareness score, by exactly the same rule.
Spending shows up in the same period's results — there's no lag. But a brand needs upkeep: each period, quality and awareness lose 10% of whatever you've built above the starting 25. Stop spending and your scores — and your customers — slowly drift away.
Your budget
Quality spend plus ad spend can't exceed the cash you have. That limit is the point: every dollar has to go where this market rewards it most, and it has to earn back more than it costs.
How customers choose
Each period 300 customers split between the three companies. Each company's attractiveness is a weighted sum of its price score, quality score, and awareness score, and its share of customers is its attractiveness over everyone's. The weights are what make every market different — some care mostly about price, some about quality, some about awareness, some about all three — and they're hidden. Watch how the rivals' different strategies fare to work out which one this market rewards.
Pricing
Price is judged against what the market is actually charging: at the average of the three prices your price score is 100, below it climbs, above it falls away steeply. Pricing well above the market also costs you sales outright, however little this market otherwise weighs price — customers have budgets. Pricing low wins share but thins your margin on every unit.
Sales, revenue, and profit
Units sold follow your share of the 300 customers. Every unit costs $10 to make, so a period's profit is (price − $10) × units sold, minus your quality and ad spend. Profit goes straight into your cash.
Company value: how you win
The winner is the company worth the most at the end, not simply the one holding the most cash. A real buyer would pay for two things: the money in the bank, and the customers the business will keep selling to after the game ends.
company value = cash + customer base customer base = average share × 300 customers × average margin × 20 periods
- Average share
- Your market share averaged over the last 10 periods (over every period played, until there have been 10).
- Average margin
- What you earn per unit — price minus the $10 unit cost — averaged over the same periods, counted between $0 and $10.
- 20 periods
- Your customers are valued as if they keep buying at that share and margin for 20 more periods.
An example
Over the last 10 periods you averaged a 32.0% share. You charged $20 most of the time but $19.00 and $19.50 in three periods, so your margin averaged $9.80. With $6,000 in cash:
customer base = 32.0% × 300 × $9.80 × 20 = $18,816 company value = $6,000 + $18,816 = $24,816
Why averages, and why your own margin
- Averages mean one period can't make or break you. A slow start keeps your customer base low for a while, even once you've taken the lead, until those periods fall out of the last 10. Likewise, a last-minute change can only shift a fraction of the number.
- Customers bought at cost are worth nothing. Pricing at $10 can win a big share, but a customer you earn nothing on adds nothing to what the business is worth.
- A high price doesn't inflate it either. The margin counts only up to $10 a unit — pricing high earns you cash now, but it costs you share, and that shows up in your customer base.
Reading the board
Under the table, each company's value is broken down into cash plus customer base, and the customer base into its average share and average margin. That's why a company leading on "Last Share" can still have a smaller customer base: the average also covers earlier periods, and any price cuts along the way.
What it means for your strategy
There are two ways to fall short: hoard cash by abandoning your brand and customers near the end (your brand fades without upkeep, and your share goes with it), or buy customers so cheaply that they earn you nothing. Build a business that keeps customers at a healthy margin, and keep it running to the last period. A company is worth its future, not just its bank balance.
Your competitors
Each rival follows one fixed strategy for the whole game, shown next to its name: a discounter prices a touch below the market and leans on advertising; a quality-focused company prices a touch above and leans on quality; a balanced one splits the difference. They budget from their recent revenue. Whichever strategy is pulling ahead is your best clue to what this market values.
The debrief
After period 20 the company with the most company value wins. The debrief names the winner, breaks its value into cash and customer base, points to the period where the winner's share moved most and what drove it, and finally reveals the weights this market ran on. Replay the seed to put what you learned to work.
The marketing mix, in this game
- Price
- → Your price, scored against the market's own average price.
- Product
- → Quality spend and the quality score it builds.
- Promotion
- → Ad spend and the awareness score it builds.
- Place
- → Not modeled here — every company reaches the same customers.
The lesson is the one real marketers face: the mix only works when it matches what your customers actually value, and you usually have to infer that from how the market responds.