Marketing
If Research and Development defines what your products are, Marketing defines how those products are presented to the world. This is the department where you decide how much to charge for each sensor, how visible it will be to customers, how accessible it will be in the marketplace, and how many units you expect to sell. Together, these decisions shape demand, revenue, and ultimately the financial health of your company.
Marketing is where strategy meets perception. A perfectly engineered product will not succeed if it is priced incorrectly, hidden from customer awareness, or forecasted poorly. Likewise, even a mediocre product can sell in volume if its price is aggressive, its promotion is strong, and its accessibility is high. In this sense, Marketing is less about engineering specifications and more about understanding how people make buying decisions, then aligning your numbers to capture that behavior.
The four primary levers in Marketing are Price, Promotion Budget, Sales Budget, and Forecasting. Price directly interacts with material cost to determine contribution margin, but it is also one of the most powerful signals to customers. A product priced above the acceptable range will quickly lose demand, while one priced below range will also lose credibility in high-tech segments. Promotion budget builds awareness: it tells customers your product exists. Sales budget builds accessibility: it makes your product easy to find and buy. Forecasting ties all of this together, forcing you to estimate how many units will actually be sold so that Production and Finance can plan accordingly.
These levers operate differently depending on the segment. Low-End customers are extremely price-sensitive but will tolerate low awareness. High-End buyers, by contrast, want to know that your product exists and is easy to access, and they will pay a premium for that assurance. Traditional customers sit somewhere in between, requiring a balanced mix. The art of Marketing in Capsim is learning how to scale these levers differently for each product so that they align with the expectations of their respective segments.
Another critical role of Marketing is to link R&D with Production. The perceptual map and buying criteria tell you how attractive your product is, but Marketing tells you how attractive it feels in the market. The customer survey score is where these forces meet: a function not only of your product’s specifications but also of its price, awareness, and accessibility. This score is one of the most important metrics in the entire simulation, because it determines what share of demand your product is capable of capturing in a given year.
Finally, Marketing is where the consequences of forecasting accuracy are felt most sharply. If you predict demand too high, Production will build excess units that sit in inventory, tying up cash and dragging down profits with carrying costs. If you forecast too low, you will stock out, leaving customers unserved and handing sales to competitors. Striking the right balance requires discipline, conservative estimation, and constant reference to reports. The best teams treat forecasting not as guesswork but as a calculated process, refined each round with data.
In short, Marketing is the voice of your company. It translates the technical realities of R&D into customer-facing signals of value and availability. When managed well, it amplifies the strengths of your products, stabilizes cash flow through accurate forecasting, and builds long-term brand presence through awareness and accessibility. When neglected, it undermines even the best-engineered offerings and exposes the company to costly inefficiencies.