Questions Harvard Food truck simulation V5 PDF

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Help for the Harvard Food Truck simulation...

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Questions Harvard Food truck simulation To be submitted in Blackboard by Sunday 24thof January (at midnight) Student number : 64199 First name : Helkoudia Name : Majda Important notes : 1) Perform the online simulation before answering the following questions. 2) Please answer the questions directly in the document using only the space provided.Keep your answers sharp and concise! 3) This is an individual assignment. An antiplagiarism tool will be used, so please work alone 1) What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method?

Research

Pushcart

Pros

Cons

Provide additional information on the market, giving better insight on your target market segment. Help structure and implement your strategy

No sales for one week, impacting your revenues.

Testing daily variations of menu/locations. Flexibility & Adaptability to consumers’ profile or change in the

Low Storage capacity (compared to truck) so low capacity of sales. Daily sale =

If implemented too early, can lack information

1/3 of truck

market’s environment (new entries, threats, etc)

Food truck

Truck has a great storage capacity => can make lots of sales and earn huge revenues

City’s permits => limit for only one menu and location/week.

2) What was your result in the simulation? 10,392 $ 3) What strategy did you follow? Why? First week, I took a look at the market data and observation (the foot traffic, frozen treat sales by demographic and etc) and chose to target significant high potential sales and almost no competition (university, pushcart and frozen yogurt as my team had no competition there, for example). I didn’t want to try the food truck right away as the constraint of using it for an entire week without changing the menu/location seemed to be the worst kind of plan: What if within the week, the customers have a change of heart? Therefore, I chose to stick to the pushcart method with its advantages (adaptability and we can see the strategy’s result immediately). Which didn’t go well, as I realized after the first week of trying the pushcart. From there, I interchanged between food truck and pushcart and realized only later that the food truck is the best format to sell.

4) What would you do differently next time? -

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I’ve waited too long to conduct a market research (one week before the last week). I should have done that on the second week in order to really grasp which method would help me on the long run. I would’ve as well pay attention to the trends. I thought I paid attention to them, but upon finishing the simulation, I realized I either didn’t use them or I did but poorly. Next time, I would’ve especially look at the mention of “popularity of local” as this seems to be a hint of how temporary menus/location wouldn’t be able to pierce the market and create revenues. As opposed of the food truck, which provide a week of the same menu on the non-changing location I also wondered if my company’s name didn’t create damage to my brand image. However, I chose this name as I wondered if the teacher could recognize me or not. Therefore, I call it “Majda Helkoudia’s Team”. Maybe, next time, choosing a better name with a local and friendly feeling would be better I completely omitted the map in my decision factor, not by choice but because I didn’t take the time to learn the structure of the game. If I had taken this precious time, I would’ve realized the potential of certain locations and the importance of the foot traffic by subway. I should’ve conducted a swot analysis on this challenge: knowing the environment I wished to evolve into is a pretty important step I failed to look into. o It could have provided a better vision on the problems/opportunities and which need to be prioritized: consumer Profile, Direct competitor(s), what’s could be my value proposition, etc. I also didn’t realize the importance of the storage capacity between the pushcart and the truck (low against huge), thus impacting the number of sales I could make. Next time, I wouldn’t use the pushcart so much and prefer the food truck method....