The Kodima Business Game Leads to Faster and Better Understanding of Marketing Management Theory

Games have been actively used in management education since the beginning of the 1950s (Keys & Wolfe, 1990; Faria, 2006), although some authors trace that method to the war game simulations of Wei-Hai in 3000 B.C (Wilson, 1968), or to the King's Game (1664), the War Chest (1780), and more (Thomas, 1957; Young, 1959; Keys and Wolfe, 1990). The development of new and considerably more sophisticated games has accelerated enormously during the last 40 years as a result of the possibilities open by new technologies (IT and communication) and new knowledge. In the field of marketing management, we have to acknowledge the role of new knowledge derived from the huge amount of available statistical data. This new marketing knowledge, combined with new technologies and the available data, has led to the development and use of business/marketing games for market simulation and even to the development by Gary Lilien and Arvind Rangaswamy of a new field of marketing – marketing engineering (Lilien & Rangaswamy, 1998; 2004). This paper concentrates on the use of the KODIMA business game in the education of Business Administration and International Finance and Trade students in modules such as Marketing Theory and Practice, Marketing Management, Marketing Analysis and Planning and the effects of that on the understanding and application of the theories that the students have to learn and use in seminars and later in their professional careers