Corporate Brand Strategy; Positive Examples (+Loyalty)

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I got a confirmation that when dealing with brand loyalty (especially important for corporate brand, since any slip up even just 1 product can ruin the entire city), the product quality of 30 is a threshold to flip loyalty opinion from negative vote to positive vote. Once it pass this threshold, the negative will instantly shift to positive.

[infoscott]

Well, success, but... [Game file attached]

I'll call it the "Diagonal Integration" strategy. In the early game, I was mostly horizontal with seaports and trading partners. As I started to build up the vertical integration, seaport sources would start drying up and I'd swap them out with my manufactured goods.

It seemed like timing was too good; just about the time the R&D would complete with the minimum necessary tech, the seaport would drop a product, and I'd scramble to build a factory to replace it. Sometimes the swap would be the exact same product at a nearby quality level, and sometimes it was a completely different product that I needed to slot into retail anyway.

The game achieved all goals in year 8.5, with 1st in revenue, and another AI company owned 60% with personal funds awarded by completing goals. Two cities had positive awareness and loyalty, one had zero, and two had negative loyalty but still positive brand rating. Five mega classes were represented; food&bev, body care&cosmetics, wearables, tobacco, and toys. Probably the biggest factors in winning were minimizing advertising expense and avoiding the use of a CEO/CTO/CMO.

My reservation about the win lies in the fact that in about 7 or 10 more years the supply chain could have been lined up far more cleanly in the diagonal strategy. The brand ratings by city could have been more favorable. To make it challenging, though, would be to place this scenario at a higher difficulty rating.

Diagonal Integration with Corporate Brand strategy requires a more challenging scenario to test effectively. Earlier today I registered with CapitalismFans.com with the intent of starting a business journal. I'll also have to write a script to set appropriate parameters for a good test game. A good start will be to set seaport quality to low, as it is too easy to just broker high quality goods until your vertical products come online.

[counting]

Well, success, but... [Game file attached]

I'll call it the "Diagonal Integration" strategy. In the early game, I was mostly horizontal with seaports and trading partners. As I started to build up the vertical integration, seaport sources would start drying up and I'd swap them out with my manufactured goods.

It seemed like timing was too good; just about the time the R&D would complete with the minimum necessary tech, the seaport would drop a product, and I'd scramble to build a factory to replace it. Sometimes the swap would be the exact same product at a nearby quality level, and sometimes it was a completely different product that I needed to slot into retail anyway.

The game achieved all goals in year 8.5, with 1st in revenue, and another AI company owned 60% with personal funds awarded by completing goals. Two cities had positive awareness and loyalty, one had zero, and two had negative loyalty but still positive brand rating. Five mega classes were represented; food&bev, body care&cosmetics, wearables, tobacco, and toys. Probably the biggest factors in winning were minimizing advertising expense and avoiding the use of a CEO/CTO/CMO.

My reservation about the win lies in the fact that in about 7 or 10 more years the supply chain could have been lined up far more cleanly in the diagonal strategy. The brand ratings by city could have been more favorable. To make it challenging, though, would be to place this scenario at a higher difficulty rating.

Diagonal Integration with Corporate Brand strategy requires a more challenging scenario to test effectively. Earlier today I registered with CapitalismFans.com with the intent of starting a business journal. I'll also have to write a script to set appropriate parameters for a good test game. A good start will be to set seaport quality to low, as it is too easy to just broker high quality goods until your vertical products come online.

Well 4 classes in one city is clearly too much for Hamburg, unless you have some 15 to 20 + average rating for low quality product, I doubt it could uphold the negative impact. As for Tianjin, it's simply that you have 2 products with quality less than 30, and a product get out run by competitors and drop its rating below city average, and the lost of milk production, thus no bottle milk clearly doesn't help (it would get you negative, but can't be used as to uphold positive influence)

Although I am quite sure what drives negative, but I still not quite sure how many factors are involved to drive positive. I believe it has something to do with rating difference with city average, as well as some rating baseline, and quality baseline perhaps? (I felt it always help with a rating > 50, and price at least not to much different from city average)

[infoscott]

...Although I am quite sure what drives negative [loyalty], but I still not quite sure how many factors are involved to drive positive. I believe it has something to do with rating difference with city average, as well as some rating baseline, and quality baseline perhaps? (I felt it always help with a rating > 50, and price at least not to much different from city average)

I'm wondering if the velocity of loyalty change may have to do with inventory turns? Apart from the monumental shifts like introducing a new mega-class (to the downside), it seems the change in loyalty is proportional to the sell through.

I'm still struggling with positive loyalty in three cities of the Wholesome Goods business journal, but many of the research projects have just now achieved top tech. The sell through I have in some of my products is massive, and many of the leather goods have a perfect 100 quality in Level 9 leather goods stores. It will be interesting to see if I get an acceleration back to a 20 - 50 loyalty in those cities.

[counting]

...Although I am quite sure what drives negative [loyalty], but I still not quite sure how many factors are involved to drive positive. I believe it has something to do with rating difference with city average, as well as some rating baseline, and quality baseline perhaps? (I felt it always help with a rating > 50, and price at least not to much different from city average)

I'm wondering if the velocity of loyalty change may have to do with inventory turns? Apart from the monumental shifts like introducing a new mega-class (to the downside), it seems the change in loyalty is proportional to the sell through.

I'm still struggling with positive loyalty in three cities of the Wholesome Goods business journal, but many of the research projects have just now achieved top tech. The sell through I have in some of my products is massive, and many of the leather goods have a perfect 100 quality in Level 9 leather goods stores. It will be interesting to see if I get an acceleration back to a 20 - 50 loyalty in those cities.

I think it's just higher portion of the market share means more customers to vote, hence higher the number shifting, both toward positive or negative depends on the current factors. It's easy to understand really, higher the base percentage of market share, a faction of that vote yes or no, is a higher percentage number.

The interesting thing to see would be whether it's about absolute sell-through, or relative sell portion in a market share. It would be interesting to experiment and check if a 1/4 population city with 4 times the sell volume has the same loyalty shifting compare to a base population and base sell volume in another city. If they are equal then its absolute sell-through, if it's 4 times as fast then its relative market share portion (or perhaps it's not 4 times, but non-linear increase due to other factors involved).

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I've done the experiment and the result is as expected the higher the percentage of the market share within the city, the faster the brand loyalty increases. Absolute throughput quantity is not the key factor. And here is the save files containing result from the starting date, and after 4 and 5 years.

The throughput of all 3 pasture products have the exactly the same output due to the limitation of farms' output with the same level in both city, selling at the same over-all rating of 40 at the beginning. And pasture products are perfect for the test, due to very low brand concern hence the increase in brand rating has little affect on over-all rating, thus we can limit the factor of over-all rating difference, since this might also cause faster loyalty changes, and because of this I also chose two cities that have the same starting local rating of -50, I tried to match the advertising daily freq of both city, since this is a factor I'm not to sure if it would impact loyalty changes (after the experiment I got a feeling that it does not, but further experiments required). Also due to only one advertising agency used per city, the upper limit of brand awareness is easily reached and capped early on at the same level of 36 to 38, so the factor of higher awareness causing faster increase can also be excluded.

The result shows, a 1.55 million people city with 2.65 times of the market share within the city compared to a 4.11 million people city, indeed is faster at gaining brand loyalty. However the ratio is closer to 3 to 4 (3.2 at year 4, and 3.94 at year 5). But this difference could be caused by some unknown factors, like the loyalty is capped by the sales volume percentage of market share within the city, or perhaps the sales revenue percentage of the total local market, that can hinder the increase of brand loyalty at some point, because after further running into the future it seems the brand loyalty of the 4.11 million people city is capped after 6 years. In the first 4 years, the increase rate ratio is relatively close to 3, when one is 2 the other is close to 6; one is 3 the other is closer to 9; 4 to 12 etc. This is consistent and within the margin of error to the exact ratio of 2.65.

[infoscott]

So it doesn't matter the size of the city, just the size of the market share? This may explain why my larger cities right now still have negative loyalty. I built about the same number of retails in each, which were the 2x2 footprints. The smaller cities have a larger market share because most of my sales have been capped by lack of sales capacity. The larger cities suffer from the cap worse than the smaller cities.

I've been going back and putting more retails in my cities to alleviate the caps, hopefully that will fix the problem. I can't see running the business journal longer than 25 or 30 years.

[counting]

So it doesn't matter the size of the city, just the size of the market share? This may explain why my larger cities right now still have negative loyalty. I built about the same number of retails in each, which were the 2x2 footprints. The smaller cities have a larger market share because most of my sales have been capped by lack of sales capacity. The larger cities suffer from the cap worse than the smaller cities.

I've been going back and putting more retails in my cities to alleviate the caps, hopefully that will fix the problem. I can't see running the business journal longer than 25 or 30 years.

If you want the journal to be like a novel, it has to have some structure, in order to push the story forward. Otherwise it would really become just like real life business journal, dry and doll for the most part. As a novel, you already set up a beginning with good incline, and a side quest, also obstacles and main theme. What you lack is the external threats and opponents, also the plot twists where leads to unpredictable outcome. The economic recession although seems like a threat, but it's kinda a let down where the protagonist saw it mile-away, result in less satisfing resolution.

Anyway, as a business journal wise, it's already quite good. And game-simulation will always hit its boundary where it can hardly maintain its illusion. Especially when AIs start to accumulate unnecessary firms and could not put itself together late in the game and make random moves. Unless players deliberately organize the market and weed out the weakling.