brand loyalty turns negative. why?

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counting
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by counting »

tosh wrote:so from what I found so far, cities where i sold my cola for an overall rating above 30 got positive brand loyalty, while cities below 30 got a negative one.
I remember in the old days, it's the product quality below 30 to be the threshold, not the rating itself (I have games that sold newly developed product at 10 or 20 rating fine all the time)
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tosh
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by tosh »

I've read the manual to double check everything and it still makes no sense. my cola quality is now 95, brand awareness is sky rocketing, around ~90-100 in every city, yet the only cities with positive brand loyalty are the ones with overall rating of >30.
Unless I'm missing something out, I can't seems to find another reason for such brand behavior. (product is widely sold in the cities, so it's not an issue of low supply, or quality or brand awareness. so unless cola gets an automatic negative BL, the only reason I find is either the price, or maybe extensive advertising, which makes less sense to me.


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counting
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by counting »

This is very curious... let me try a pure cola corporate and be my first youtube capitalism series. See if the same problem pop up.
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lucks
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by lucks »

correct me if im wrong. according to this you lose loyalty when:
The Quality is low ( i would assume in comparison to either City average or local vendors. or it might be a fixed Minimum value )
Quality Changes (up and down), or multiple Versions with different Quality on the Market.

But that would also mean that Pricing should not influence the Loyalty.

But we all know that we lose customers when we up the pricing. i doubt we could Price our products as expensive as we would like even after archieving a 100% loyality Rating and high/unchanging product Quality.
azxcvbnm321
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by azxcvbnm321 »

I notice the exact same problem, but only with cola and cigarettes. All of my products are the highest quality sold or else I don't advertise. My cola has a quality rating of 94 and there are no other competitors than local, still my brand loyalty is negative. Sure the prices are high but I don't understand the negative loyalty either since I have a much higher quality rating than the local competition.
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David
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by David »

azxcvbnm321 wrote:I notice the exact same problem, but only with cola and cigarettes. All of my products are the highest quality sold or else I don't advertise. My cola has a quality rating of 94 and there are no other competitors than local, still my brand loyalty is negative. Sure the prices are high but I don't understand the negative loyalty either since I have a much higher quality rating than the local competition.
The overall rating of the product also matters. If you set your product's price too high, people are going to expect equally high quality and if your product's actual quality cannot meet the high expectation, the brand loyalty will suffer.

Perhaps you could try reducing the price and see if that will bring the brand loyalty back to a positive value.
counting
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by counting »

Is brand loyalty always work like this? I guess since I played with local competitor competence at least high, I can't set rating low enough for it to be obvious.

And does this mean [brand rating + brand quality] has to cross certain threshold to prevent negative loyalty? The combined value also has to be higher than certain threshold for the brand loyalty to increase as well?
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tosh
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by tosh »

David wrote:
azxcvbnm321 wrote:I notice the exact same problem, but only with cola and cigarettes. All of my products are the highest quality sold or else I don't advertise. My cola has a quality rating of 94 and there are no other competitors than local, still my brand loyalty is negative. Sure the prices are high but I don't understand the negative loyalty either since I have a much higher quality rating than the local competition.
The overall rating of the product also matters. If you set your product's price too high, people are going to expect equally high quality and if your product's actual quality cannot meet the high expectation, the brand loyalty will suffer.

Perhaps you could try reducing the price and see if that will bring the brand loyalty back to a positive value.
So it is the price issue.
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by infoscott »

I'm resurrecting this thread, because it is probably the best one on the Forum that deals with issues of brand loyalty. The other people did a pretty good job of covering the the big factors in supporting or tarnishing the brand, but here is one that got mostly overlooked.
[Saturating the city with advertising] ...may have a negative effect on brand loyalty if you cannot satisfy the increase in demand.
Cap2 manual, page 33.

I have found the quickest way to lose brand loyalty is be selling a product that people like and run into supply shortages. If supply is spotty but still delivering, the loyalty will drop slowly. If your supply runs out and you let the store stay empty of that product for an extended period of time, loyalty will drop very quickly. And if you are running a Corporate Brand strategy, all your products will suffer in that city!

Leveraging off what I learned playing the B2B script, I'm trying out the Legacy Brand scenario. You start the scenario with about 60 brand points in all 5 cities, about 30 points from awareness and 30 points from loyalty. Great...awesome! Except on the first month just about anything you sell under your brand will hurt these ratings. [FYI, my CEO's expertise is Furniture, but I don't know if that's true every game or just this run. The game sets you to Corporate Brand and you're not allowed to change it.]

So some of the strategies for early game to make money can really hurt your brand:
1) Private label consumer goods from the seaports. Since the AIs will also sell those products (unbranded or not), when the demand goes up and the supply stretches thin, you won't be able to keep up with enough supply. Now the sims will be mad at you and not the Seaport because it's your name on it. You would have to set your price low and sell into all five cities in order to lock them out due to negative profit margin.
2) Sell frozen foods from your new farms. This might work if your quality is better than local, but the Diversified AI's will quickly compete with you. That is probably going to be brand awareness stalemate.
3) Find an AI starting to sell high quality products and rebrand for your stores. See 1), you don't know if his supply will keep up with your demand.

Some strategies that probably will work, but will take time:
1) Quickly research a few products to a much higher tech, then make yourself. You can use inferior products if the Tech portion of product quality is high. But be careful about selling from too many classes, as that will lower brand loyalty. I'm starting with Furniture mostly, since that is my specialty. I'll probably also sell leather goods, since I need textiles and leather for my furniture.
2) Sell semi products. B2B sales do not affect brand ratings, only retail sales.
3) Invest in real estate (learned from the CAPEX script lessons).
4) Invest in raw materials. Will probably only work in my case for timber, as I can make Beds (with higher tech) and Dyestuff.

Some other tactics that will be absolutely necessary to help keep brand rating high.
1) Use warehouses. A distribution center that buffers supply can help you keep an eye on stock before a retail location runs out.
2) Keep prices high. The sims will tolerate high prices as long as they don't raise too fast. Keep raising prices often and by a little bit, probably by keeping brand rating only 0 - 3 points above local. Besides, it lets you command less market share but at a higher profit margin.
3) Swap to a different product in your store if it looks like you won't keep up with demand. If all else fails, demolish that store and either build some other structure or sell of the land.
4) Keep up on technology. Staying in the top tech position means your competition will be at a bigger brand disadvantage and make yourself look better to the sims.
5) Limit how many classes you sell. I'm going for furniture, leather goods, and maybe apparel, since the last two are in the same mega class.

So, does anybody else have testimonies of when supply shortages hurt their loyalty?
counting
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Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?

Post by counting »

There's a difference between "brand loyalty dropping", and "brand loyalty turns negative".

Honestly I think brand mechanics is the least understood part of the Capitalism game, when I was helping with testing the brand inherent mechanics, I found many counter-intuitive features about brand. Personally I believe brand loyalty change consists of two part, a constant shifting weight value always drag it toward 0, and a delta value affected by many factors, like price, quality, average quality, ratings, product market shares, brand awareness changes, etc. Evey time when brand loyalty is recalculated it will add the weight value and the delta value both onto current loyalty.

So if some condition, like when there are no product exist on the market, the zero value multiply with other factors makes the overall delta value becomes 0, thus just the weight factor affects the loyalty changes. Hence loyalty drops toward 0 when loyalty is positive, but goes up when loyalty already starts as negative (weight value drag loyalty toward 0).

However, under the condition such as quality is poor, or price is too high, causing rating too low, also the product is selling product with enough market share, the delta value could end-up be a large negative value, plus the weight down value, thus not only loyalty drops to 0 but eventually also turns negative (also the negative delta value has to be large enough to overcome the weight up when loyalty value already pass 0 into negative). This model can explain a lot of the phenomena I observed such as when the quality and rating is bad, but not bad enough, the loyalty seems to hover just below 0, and bounce back to 0 without apparent reason, and refuse to go further negative. And most of the time it would take quite some effort for loyalty starts from 0 finally goes upward since many factors have to make the delta value become large enough and overcome the weight value.
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