MARS Cook Enterprises

Used in college classrooms since 2003

Business simulations for college marketing and sales courses.
Easy to adopt.

MARS gives every student a firm of their own — a sales district or a product line — and puts them in a market against their classmates. They decide, you press Run once a week, and the results argue back. Everything runs in the browser: nothing to install, nothing to collect, no files to move.

Request instructor access See the demo No account needed — read a real report, and try the form students type into.
Sales Management · District 4 Period 3
Rep Salary Comm. Quota Training
Bob 12,500 8.0% 128,000 Time & Territory
Emily 12,500 8.0% 160,000 People Skills
Kevin 7,500 8.0% 80,000 Product Knowledge
Jen 6,250 8.5% 80,000 Selling Technique
Katie 4,000 9.0% 64,000 Company Orientation
Seasonal index 0.4 Awaiting decisions
A decision sheet going into the fourth quarter, where demand runs four times the third. The reps don't all want the same thing — one works for money, one for recognition, one to be left alone.

Two simulations

Pick the one that fits your course.

Both are competitive: one student's decisions change everyone else's results. Both are built for undergraduate or graduate sections, and both run the same way.

SMS

Sales Management

Students run a district of five salespeople and compete for sales, share, and contribution to profit.

Each period they set salary and commission, assign quotas and bonuses, book training, decide how closely to supervise, and split each rep's selling time across three classes of account. The reps respond differently, and the way they respond is not obvious from the numbers alone.

  • Built for Sales Management · Personal Selling
  • Term length Up to 16 periods — run as few as your course needs
  • Decisions Compensation, quota, training, territory
  • Reports Profitability, sales potential, market share, rep satisfaction

MMS

Marketing Management

Students run a product line across four market segments as the marketing manager: planning, implementation, and control.

Each period they set retail and wholesale price, fund advertising, promotion, and publicity, size and deploy the sales force, and commit to R&D projects that take several periods to reach market. Where their products land in customers' minds shows up on a perceptual map.

  • Built for Intro to Marketing · Marketing Management
  • Term length Up to 16 periods — run as few as your course needs
  • Decisions Price, promotion, sales force, R&D
  • Reports Perceptual map, brand awareness, profitability by product

How a term runs

Four things happen. Two of them are yours.

You set the class up once and run each period — one button, or none if you set a weekly deadline and let MARS run it. Students enter their own decisions and pull their own reports. Most adopters spend more time discussing results than administering them.

Before period 1

You create a class section

Name it and choose the simulation. Give your email address to the class. MARS splits it into industries of about five students and keeps them balanced. That is the setup.

Registration

Students join your section

They enter your email address, pick your section from the list, and pay for their own seat — the same way they buy a textbook. No roster to collect, no fees to handle, and nothing for them to mistype.

Every period

They decide, you run it

Students enter decisions on their own time and can revise until the period runs. You run the section once and every industry in it moves together — or set a weekly deadline and MARS runs it for you, reminding anyone who has not submitted.

After each run

Results come back the same minute

Reports, rankings, and a letter from head office explaining what went right or wrong — so a student who misread the quarter finds out why.

The work it saves

The parts nobody wants to do, done for you.

  • The registration paragraph for your syllabus

    MARS writes it, filled in with your section name, your email address and your class code. Copy it straight into a syllabus or an LMS announcement.

  • Chasing the students who have not submitted

    If you run on a deadline, MARS emails anyone who has not submitted the day before and again in the last hour, and tells you afterwards who missed it.

  • Building balanced groups

    Students register themselves. MARS splits the class into industries of about five and rebalances on the first run, so a class of nine and a class of forty both work.

  • Getting the marks into your gradebook

    One CSV for the whole section — every student, every period, sales, share, profit and rank. Not one file per group.

Evidence

Students rated it above the textbook.

Five sections of Sales Management at two universities, 151 students. Each rated the textbook and the simulation on the same fifteen statements.

Textbook MARS simulation
Mean rating on a 9-point scale, where 9 = strongly agree. The simulation scored higher on all fifteen statements; every difference was significant at p < .001 by two-tailed t-test.
Statement Mean rating, 1–9
Scale

Source: evaluation questionnaires, five Sales Management sections, two universities.

Cost

Twenty-nine dollars, per student.

One student, one firm, one price. Nothing to divide, nothing to collect, and nobody sitting in a section they did not pay for. A student taking two of your courses registers for each.

$29per student, per section

Included, at no charge
Your instructor accountFree
Manuals, slides and test questionsFree
As many class sections as you teachFree
Demonstration sections to exploreFree

Route one

Students pay directly

The usual arrangement. Nothing is charged to the department, and each student pays when they join their section — so no fee collection lands on you.

Route two

The department pays

We invoice the school for the class and issue one class code. Students join with a code instead of a card.

Route three

Something else

Bookstore bundles, lab fees, grant funding, a purchasing office with its own rules. Tell us what your institution needs and we will work to it.

Access runs six months, or until you delete the section — whichever comes first. West Virginia purchasers are charged state sales tax as required.

Next step

Ask for a password and look around.

Instructor access is free and carries no obligation. It opens the instructional material and puts working simulations in front of you, so you can play a few periods before deciding anything.

  • Instructor and student manuals for both simulations
  • Presentation slides and test questions
  • Demonstration simulations you can run yourself
  • The platform to run your own sections once you adopt

Write to

Dr. Robert W. Cook

Author, MARS Simulations

support@shootformars.com

(304) 276-5322

Request instructor access

Tell us your school, the course, and roughly when it meets. You should have your password within a day.

Not ready to ask? See the demo first — no account, nothing to install.