All decisions made in a game possess the qualities of Width, Depth and Tenacity. A Width decision is one where the player makes an Assortment choice within the generic areas available. These could be in such areas as Pricing, Place, Production, Accounting, Market Research and Finance. These are generic Width decisions, just as a customer, when buying a car, can choose from any number of car companies such as Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Nissan and Honda when thinking about buying a car. After entering the dealer’s showroom, the customer has to make a number of Depth or Variety decisions about the purchase of cars with different trim lines, colors, brands and options for each brand.

As an example of the Depth associated with generic Width strategy that involves product pricing Table X indicates the Variety or Depth choices available to the player for up to five separate price and customer categories once it has been decided that a Price strategy is the path to success. In this case there are five retail price decisions, five retail rebate prices, the priorities attached to each product and the degree that the decision maker wants to make them available for sale. Because the company’s pricing decisions can be entered for 12 separate markets the player must, or can, make up to 240 price-related decisions per business period.

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Conceptualizing Grit

Within the Grip framework, a player’s online decision-making behavior has three dimensions. Width, or the breadth of the marketing mix areas that could be examined and the Depth to which they investigate implementing the price decision. Because Grit entails the vigorous pursuit of the person’s goals over time, the Tenacity dimension of perseverance be included. The result is the three-dimension cube presented in Figure XX. These are the three aspects of the decision-making process that will be examined over the course of game play.📷

Calculating Grit

Every quarter or period of the game a company has to make a number of Width and Depth actions and both of these take time. Thus, a very ambitious company that investigated and used a Wide assortment of the generic actions available would accumulate a relatively high number of

Width actions. Given a firm employed a wide assortment of marketing mix options, the number of visits within the Width decision is recorded again as visits. The total amount of time spent on the company’s Width and Depth actions is recorded as (screen) visits. The level at which, and the consistency of these visits, measures the player’s Tenacity. This measure is a Tenacity Index that reflects the fact that the player with the highest amount of Grit would dedicate a steady number of minutes to their Width and Depth decision over the course of play. A player whose overall average amount of time per period was very high, would be considered to have less Grit. The lowest amount of Grit would be displayed by a player who inconsistently made a low number of Width and Depth visits during the game. Figure X is an example of the activity profile generated by a player in the study. The player in this figure generated a XX.X Grit Index. 📷