Ouuuuuuu... This is a big question.
First of all, I don't know if you know, citizens lived in different city have different concern for each product, i.e. each market is different, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. For example, In this scenario, Leather Jacket could have very high price concern in one city, but very high brand concern in another, as shown below.
- jacket_brand_concern_Warsaw.jpg (361.24 KiB) Viewed 3138 times
- jacket_brand_concern_Miami.jpg (369.28 KiB) Viewed 3138 times
Like in Warsaw, the price concern is 47%, and brand concern only 20%; on the contract, in Miami, the price concern is 28%, but brand concern is 40%. This basically means what's working in Warsaw, wouldn't work well in Miami. In Warsaw, it doesn't matter much if your brand is significantly higher, as long as you sell the jacket cheap (with reasonable quality), you should have larger market share; In Miami, the brand rating matters a lot, you have to invest heavily in marketing in order for the product to sell well.
Having said above, we still need to see the larger picture. Market dominance is an integral index of all markets in all cities, so you don't actually need to take majority in "every city" to dominate this product, but preferably focus more on larger population cities in this scenario (like focus more in Paris and Seoul).
And if there are resistances everywhere in every city, the tough heads on price battles would certainly cut profit, even heavy losses to every competitors (including you) in this product. Hence don't expect to make a profit, when the battle of price war is still waging, try to move into other related but currently less-competed products (preferably those share raw materials you already produced) and make profits there to cover the expenses. For Apparels, leather goods are very close since you should have abundant leather; Or furnitures (if there are lumbers available) since they also use cotton and leather; Or shoes, even toy dolls, as long as you have spare capacity to make those products.
Another important things I think I already said in another post, it's not about the number of retail stores you had, it's their traffic index and capacity matter more. More stores are just more cost. Also make sure you have enough production capacity to fulfill the demand bar in a price war. You won't get majority market share, if there are not enough quantity to sell. A good rule is to make sure one of your retail store already had enough supply before opening new retail stores, otherwise they would be idle most of the time doing nothing due to shortage in production, no matter how cheap or how good the quality and brand rating are. Remember, when overall rating increases, the total market demand amount increases as well (but the total revenue don't change that much)
Finally, notice that price matters, overall rating is mostly just a guideline, a competitor can have a poor quality, and brand, and much lower product overall rating (like -10 even -20 compare to yours) and still beat you in total sales quantity if the price is extremely lower (like 1/2 or even 1/3 of the price). You would probably have higher total revenue (like if you have 1/3 of the sales quantity in market share compared to the competitor at 1/2 of the market but half the price, you would beat the competitor in revenue 4 to 3, but sales quantity is 2 to 3). Hence if the goal is about market dominance you would probably have to go into price war with the competitors, especially if there are more than 1 competitor.
BTW, there are alternatives than heads on competition. Since this game is called Capitalism, you could also try to increase your capital, and play the capital market game, where you raise enough capital and try to merger the top competitors in that product to get their major market share (instead of you have to do the heavy lifting). A lot of time, it's even more cost effective.
