Welcome to Circular Markstrat and congratulations on your new position!
Circular Markstrat gives an environmental perspective to Markstrat simulation and includes environmental concerns in a plausible economic perspective. Circular Markstrat has been developed around the setting of Sustainability Goals set by ONU (www.undp.org) and using principles of Circular Economy mentioned by Ellen Mc Arthur Fondation (www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org). Circular economy is currently viewed as a promising approach to help reduce our global sustainability pressures and thus offers a solid setting for this simulation. Integrating Circular economy principles into Markstrat “Durable goods” is particularly relevant with the type of goods dealt with, durable goods (such as tablet pcs for instance), which are often used as examples for circular principles.
Besides bringing an environmental setting based on circular economy considerations, Circular Markstrat is well anchored in another setting that companies have to deal with nowadays: digitalization of markets. Grouping together environmental and digital issues in a Strategic Marketing simulation is completely in line with real companies’ concern of being viable, or even profitable from an economic point of view, while caring about the environmental footprint of their company and of their products, in a more and more digitalized world. This simulation also takes reactions from the market into account, where consumers and governments are more and more concerned by environmental issues (they want to avoid leaving present or future generations worse off), which makes them more demanding in terms of companies’ ability to adapt to these new challenges. It leads to certain pressure from the market and from authorities, which is even a bigger challenge for companies living in very competitive markets as it is the case in the Markstrat world. Companies also have to consider consumer segments who are not sensitive to environmental issues and make strategic decisions about what they want to offer them.
You and the other members of your team have just been recruited by a large corporation to manage the marketing department of one of its divisions. Coming from a different industry, your team has no experience in the Circular Markstrat world. You will compete with several other firms to market durable goods to consumers.