Products Customization Doubt

[Cassius]

Hi,

On the official page says the each customization will have their own demand and supply, but after i customize one of my products I couldn't see that, at least on the pizza graph of the product. Every customization of my products shows the same pizza graph.

By reading the official page I though this costumization was supposed to work as a new product having its own supply and demand including a new pizza graph showing the city demand for this "new product", but this supply and demand is different only in the bars of the left side of the product image and this shows only the supply and demand of the product on the retail store and not on the city (the city demand seems to be the same for all customized products).

I would like a more detailed explanation of how the product customization works in terms of city demand of the product, because the way I se it, the custumized products are compenting with each other for a slice of the city pizza demand graph.

Tanks,

Cassius

[eleaza]

Customized products with different tech level is still the same "product". It's a concept similar to market segmentation. For example a real world smartphone manufacturing company often produces more than one type of smartphones, where there are low-end, cheap phone, and there are more advanced type, and there are very expensive, premium smartphone. By doing this, it can maximize it's profit by appealing to wide range of customers and increase its market share. It's somewhat similar with product customization in the game.

In Capitalism game, you would often see there are still "white market share" in the pie chart, and sometime you can only fully monopoly the market share of that product, by decrease its price to unreasonably low, which actually often make less total revenue than when there are still "white market share" provided by "local supplier". But, if you have different tech level of the same "product", you can fill this left over market share, by providing cheaper and poorer quality product. And at the same time the over all rating of the top tier tech to the lowest tech tier customized product stay the same. Hence you can stay at a total rating of 100, and fill out the entire market, with less total production quantity. (instead of a ridiculous 120 or even 140 total rating of the top tech level high quality goods and massive amount of production to completely fill all market share)

And you don't actually need to turn on the product customization, and still able to do this. Just turn off the auto-apply tech level option, and allow some old production line stay at low tech, thus get low quality goods of the same product. Or just warehouse some of the old products in advance. But the downside is, either you have to be very careful not to accidently level the manufacturing unit, and often cause waste cost, and you can't repurpose new line to produce old tech product either. (by warehousing it, obviously you will run out someday). By using product customization, you can choose to produce old or new tech level product, and easily fill all the market share. Different image there is just easier than the old method to allow you to distinguish them in manufacturing.

In a way, it's an approximation of the "obsolete" product mechanism, where you can run the game hundreds of years in the future, and the older customization product will make smaller and smaller over all market share in total, where highest tier tech product market share is the "real current users", without complete phase out the old one, where they all appeal to the same crowd.

[David]

A very thorough explanation!

[eleaza]

I didn't understand it either when this feature first introduced, but later someone send me a city with total market share domination, and I was curious how it is done. So I investigate those industries and found out how interesting product customization actually worked.

Several things about production customization I notice though, first one is that it doesn't work well with ranged brand, or corporate brand, since there are many different quality of goods in the same class everywhere. Even unique brand will cost more advertisement to promote, however since most unique brand corporation later on tends to have its own medias and reimburse advertisement spending, this is less of an issue.

The second one is that since there's a need to maintain old product line and new product line in different factories and separate retail shops for each tech level product, so this certainly has a higher overhead cost, but I'm not sure which has more net profit compared to not customize products, since higher market share means more products been sold and more revenue. They are just different. Also the product list in Product Details is also different when there are competitions from other companies, the list looked wider, and somehow feels the total market even in the same pie chart, but bigger and segmented.

The third one is that although it's fun, but sometimes tiresome to setup all those 120x120 images, and micromanage all the different product lines as well as different tech level retail stores. It's double, or triple work, or even higher. If concentrating on few products, it's OK, but fine tuning price is still a lot of work. And I can say, warehouses are extremely important to maintain all the different product lines everywhere, and need to be quite careful not to mixed old ones with the new.

What I am not sure is how well COO can handle this, never tried it, and I don't hired COO, I'm more of a hands on gal, like to directly control all the tiny details. I am also not sure how subsidiaries or other AI corporations handle this. They seems to just produce and sell the highest tier level products, but haven't played enough games with product customization to say for sure.