What causes brand to be stuck at 0?

[messer]

There's a concept inside the game that I fail to understand, "Brand".

As in I believe I understand it for the most part but sometimes it just seems broken and I can't reason about why it behaves as it does.

I have an ongoing game where I'm trying to get market dominance in Cosmetics, but for a couple of products inside specific cities I have had "0 Brand" for a long time and it seems like it stays at zero regardless of what I do.

Each product have a unique brand

Any suggestions what might be going on here?
Same product are distributed from a warehouse to all cities, brand behaves as I would expect in most cities and in some they just seem broken and stuck at 0?

Save file: https://file.io/2Y9xHSXtc25o or https://filebin.net/ff9vdpthn4qckbx0/br ... t=togeb7dr
Example image:

[messer]

It seems one issue is that competitors are spending tons of $$$ on advertising (1M+ / month)
But it is still kinda weird because the most known brand spends 0 and maintains their large value

I'm still market leader but have 0 brand awareness, and 0 brand loyalty. aren't brand at all linked to people using the product?

From my experience it feels like if people purchase the product and likes it, the brand rating will increase.
Likes it is in my mind synonymous to the overall rating was good/better than what is available on the market.
If that is the case for a long period of time, I would expect the value to increase (which imo is normally the case)

Feels like I'm missing something related to the algorithm controlling the brand rating.

[Brutus]

I booted up your game and this is what I can summarize:

You are using the 'Unique Brand' strategy which raises the brand rating the fastest but also costs the most to raise it with.

In Jakarta your spending only 177k on advertisement. You're spending just below the amount it costs to maintain brand ... so you're wasting money here essentially since you're at 0 brand and any brand gains are withered away through time before they can accumulate. You need to throw in at least double to triple to see your brand rating grow here. Bigger cities with more population require bigger advertisement budgets in this game. Keep that in mind. Jakarta is 2.5x bigger than Johannesburg but you only gave it 50% more advertisement budget. That's why it won't grow. You need to drastically up the advertisement here.

Some of your competitors are using the 'Corporate Brand' strategy which is why you 'think' they don't advertise but they do still advertise only through other methods and on other products rather than Eye Shadow. Those that also use the Unique Brand strategy will advertise at least 1 million and even up to 4 million per product. Your 177k is a pittance in comparison

There's 3 brand strategies and you can select whichever one you want in the information center under the ''Corporate Details'', ''Brand'' subsection for Your Company. There you can read up on the three different brand strategies and decide which one is best for you. Remember that if you switch mid-game, you lose ALL your brand points ... I know ... kinda stupid but that's how it works

Brand is rather awkward in this game, it's kinda like a meter you throw in as much cash till it fills up to 100 and then you can tone it down to the minimum to maintain the rating.

Personally I just recommend throwing as much cash as you got on advertisement at once until the brand rating is maxed out and then crank it all the way down to see what the minimum you can get away with to maintian that brand rating. I personally never play with Unique Brand rating because of this as I find it extremely micro intensive having to worry about every products individual brand rating and advertisement. It probably works if you have a CMO for that but I can't be bothered 9 out of 10 times with that.

Lastly ... what the frick are you doing with all your stores and factories. Nearly all your stores and some factories are underselling your products below the factory sell/cost price. Luckily some of your factories are making boat loads of money to offset some of this this due to low input cost and high sales but it is a logistical nightmare to process all of this. How do you even know if a product is profitable this way?

You're one of the largest companies in the game with 2 billion in revenue but you are still losing money? What have you been doing mate? Are you trying to throw away cash? I see you're price warring yourself into the dirt in some areas, selling cough syrup for 80 cents ... is this your philanthropy department? Providing healthcare for the poor at ridiculously low affordable prices?

[messer]

Thanks Brutus!

I always thought that brand rating was also affected by successful sales, as in, you would get brand rating by people using your product and liking it.
Given that I had >50% sales I would have assumed that to be the case here, but I guess the heavy advertising by competitors kinda overshadowed my potential gain.

I think I have a better understanding of how the algorithm works now, thanks^^

This game is a scenario like game, need market dominance in 3specific product classes + 2000M revenue + 200M profit and then the game ends.

I was doing a push towards reaching that goal to get a good score, but due to brand rating being stuck at 0 it became too costly to maintain market dominance.
I think I would have succeeded if the brand rating would have increased by people purchasing and using the product as I assumed.

Win some lose some, better luck next time I guess!

Thanks for this insightful comment:

In Jakarta your spending only 177k on advertisement. You're spending just below the amount it costs to maintain brand ... so you're wasting money here essentially since you're at 0 brand and any brand gains are withered away through time before they can accumulate. You need to throw in at least double to triple to see your brand rating grow here. Bigger cities with more population require bigger advertisement budgets in this game. Keep that in mind. Jakarta is 2.5x bigger than Johannesburg but you only gave it 50% more advertisement budget. That's why it won't grow. You need to drastically up the advertisement here.

Some of your competitors are using the 'Corporate Brand' strategy which is why you 'think' they don't advertise but they do still advertise only through other methods and on other products rather than Eye Shadow. Those that also use the Unique Brand strategy will advertise at least 1 million and even up to 4 million per product. Your 177k is a pittance in comparison

I have always looked at brand rating as something you build over time, but I think it is more valuable to think about it from a binary perspective. Either you fight to increase brand rating by spending massively, or you try to maintain it as cost efficiently as possible.

I think this hints that all brand modifications for a product is put into a pool and normalized across all competitors and that "advertising" has a higher overall multiplier than the "successful sales/use factor"

[Brutus]

I have always looked at brand rating as something you build over time, but I think it is more valuable to think about it from a binary perspective. Either you fight to increase brand rating by spending massively, or you try to maintain it as cost efficiently as possible.

Brand is actually a bit more complicated than what I made it seem out to be.

There's two major components to brand rating.

1) Brand Awareness, how well known your product is in this city.
2) Brand Loyalty, how happy/loyal people are with your product in this city. (I think)

The total of these 2 numbers is your Brand Rating and it cannot exceed 100 points total.

Brand Awareness is easily generated and raised by throwing gobs of money at the advertisement unit and allowing it to build up overtime till 100 points. Once you reach max points of awareness that basically means everyone that could have heard about your product has been made aware of your product and you can drastically scale down advertisements. Brand Loyalty on the other hand is only generated when a ''brand aware'' person buys your product and is happy/unhappy with said product. For them to be happy they need to not have paid more money than what the product is worth and the quality is high enough to be satisfactory. This means that you can't really generate lots of loyalty on low quality products. In fact, if you have a lot of brand awareness but a piss poor quality product, it is likely you will incur a Brand Loyalty penalty. This means if you sell terrible quality products but invest a ton in marketing that you may not be able to max out the brand rating at 100 and a lot of money would be wasted in trying to achieve it regardless. (consider a negative brand loyalty as a negative public opinion on you or something)

You can only generate brand loyalty if you already have brand awareness. I'm not sure how it works but it seems that a customer that is ''brand aware'' of your product, buys it and then is happy with the sale generates brand loyalty positively or negatively. This does mean as you correctly thought that it is important to have successful sales. If you for whatever reason lose a consistent supply source for a product (interruption of some sort and sales stop) your brand rating will absolutely start nose diving to the floor.

Ideally you want to get lots of positive brand loyalty as I believe this number sticks around the longest and essentially forms a bedrock of solid brand rating that doesn't erode as quickly as awareness does. I personally like to see Brand Loyalty as a number for indicating the amount of loyal customers but I don't think this is how it actually works.

Given that I had >50% sales I would have assumed that to be the case here, but I guess the heavy advertising by competitors kinda overshadowed my potential gain.

I'm not 100% sure but I believe it doesn't matter at all how much your competitor advertises compared to you. It also doesn't matter how many sales you have if those sales are not made to any ''brand aware'' customers. Yes this is incredibly strange and kind of immersion breaking when you realize you MUST advertise to even generate any brand awareness or loyalty. You'd think the game would have some sort of word of mouth or customers who bought your product to become ''aware'' of your brand but nope ... you got to advertise for it.

There are some products whose quality rating is based largely on the brand rating such as cosmetics and you'd do well to invest in marketing for them if you are capable of doing so as the potential increase in sales and profit you can make is immense. Other times for things like livestock products (frozen chicken, etc) investing a lot of money in advertisements is usually just a major drain to your finances. I'd only do that if I'd want to eek out an advantage and I got the money to spare.

Maybe David can chime in and provide the actual formulas and mechanics but this is about as good as I know it from the top of my head.

You can always look at the Capitalism 2 Manual and try to find answers there if you have any other questions or want a more detailed explanation.

Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/stea ... 1582939156

[David]

Maybe David can chime in and provide the actual formulas and mechanics but this is about as good as I know it from the top of my head.

You have done a very good job explaining it. I've pinned this thread at the top of the forum. I'm sure anyone who has doubts about brand ratings will find the info helpful.

[CapitalismLabStory]

I have found the AI way to marketing to be the best. Start with a product and start advertising from day 1. Even if it is at the start of the game just do it

At the start of the game you can use port goods to cover costs and as you progress and build your base you will have enough money to spend on advertising. I always go for range advertising as it helps me the most with product classes especially if it takes a lot of start producing another one.

I haven't tried subsidiary yet but apparently corporate branding helps when each subsidiary focuses on 1 class.

Never used unique branding either. But it always seems like a mission.

So I always go for range branding and use my expertise products to up my quality. And if you have cash, budget a bit to advertise $500k for a year at least. This way when you bring in the next product you are not fighting from 0 but using the same brand.

And down the line get your own media company. Always helps