Michael A. Levin, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor of Marketing at Otterbein University in Westerville, OH. His research focuses on marketing strategy, public policy, and antitrust. He has published in several journals including Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, and the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and Marketing Management Journal and has presented at several management and marketing conferences.

He served as the special editor for the Marketing Education Review’s special issue on teaching innovation. Dr. Levin advises Otterbein’s award-winning analytics team and remains an active supporter of undergraduate research. He teaches marketing analytics, retail management, and sales. Currently, he serves as conference chair and president elect for the Society of Marketing Advances, an international group serving members of the marketing academy.

My experience with MarketShare

“My Marketing Principles course benefits in three ways by using a simulation. One, they write, implement, and evaluate a marketing plan. Two, they make managerial decisions while responding to competitors’ actions. Three, they apply theory to practice.

Writing a marketing plan is easy. It is far more difficult to implement it. With a simulation, they write a marketing plan, implement it through the simulation, and then evaluate their performance against the results from the simulation.

While working with the simulation, students make managerial decisions. Their decisions, though, are tempered by competitors’ actions. As students learn through a simulation, decisions are not made or executed in a vacuum. Competitors’ responses do impact each group’s performance. In turn, each group reaches a decision based in large part on how competitors behave within the market.

At the beginning of the course, students learn about a resource-based theory of competition. Briefly, this theory predicts and explains a firm’s success based on management’s ability to allocate resources, and, ultimately, achieve superior financial performance. Conversely, it also predicts and explains a firm’s failure based on management’s inability to allocate resources, and, ultimately achieve inferior financial performance. Students can read about this theory; however, through a simulation, they experience how this theory explains and predicts the market conditions.

This theory treats information as a resource. Through a simulation, students realize the importance of both information asymmetry, and the value placed on information. These allocations of information affect the firm’s performance in the simulation. Ultimately, a team is rewarded for its ability to achieve superior financial performance relative to its competitors because this team better allocates its informational resource.

These three benefits contribute to students’ learning because students internalize these lessons. Students realize the difficulty associated with successfully implementing a plan, understand how competitors affect the firm’s performance, and apply a theory to explain and predict a specific situation. My Marketing Principles students benefit more from a simulation than other forms of learning because a simulation allows them to apply theory to practice.”