Marketing 101: Muzzy Lane's 2010 award-winning business game

Marketing 101 - The Principles of Marketing was developed by Muzzy Lane for McGraw Hill Higher Education in the UK. It is a 3D, turn-based game that teaches college students how product marketing and competition work. The design is built around seven principles for marketing strategy: image, differentiation, repeat business, ease of doing business, networking, likeability and emotion.

At the 2010 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge it won the Best Business-Developed Game award. The contest's 2010 results list Marketing 101 among twelve finalists, and the game was shown in the contest pavilion at I/ITSEC in Orlando that year. Other 2010 winners were Energize (Best Student-Developed Game), Moonbase Alpha (Best Government-Developed Game) and Boarder's Ahoy! The Maritime Interdiction Game (People's Choice Award).

The player manages a company's new entry into the backpack market. Market research has narrowed the field to five possible segments, and the first decision is which one to target. A backpack builder then lets the player design a pack for that group's needs, followed by a price that is competitive for the segment. After that come negotiations with retail channels for distribution and choices on how the bag is marketed and advertised.

At the end of each turn the player reviews and submits the marketing decisions and then sees quarterly or yearly profit and loss, market trends and positioning, competitor data and customer feedback. The cycle tests whether the player applies the fundamentals consistently, and it suits introductory marketing courses where a textbook chapter on segmentation needs a hands-on counterpart.

Muzzy Lane's website loads in November 2026. Its front page presents Author, an authoring platform for roleplay assessments that can be published to learning systems such as Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle and Open edX, and it lists higher education and K-12, corporate learning and development, and publishers as its audiences. McGraw Hill appears among the logos shown. Marketing 101 is not mentioned on the front page, so the game's current availability could not be confirmed and it is listed as unconfirmed.

The page names institutional users of Author, among them Colorado State University Global, Herzing University, Excelsior University, Western Governors University, George Mason University and the University of Kansas, and states that 6.2 million students have been served. Judged by its front page, the company now centers on a tool that lets course designers write their own scenarios, and no longer on a single titled game.