Re: brand loyalty turns negative. why?
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2015 7:31 pm
I think that drag weight towards zero you are feeling is what I would call the "irritation index". Working in retail a number of years, I see many things that irritate the customer, but the customer keeps coming back because we have what they need marginally better than anywhere else. Where I work now is the all too common case in Capitalism where the awareness is high, but the loyalty is close to zero or even negative. If the customers perceived they had a better choice to shop anywhere else, they would.
In Capitalism, there are a lot of things we do (or more often don't do) to augment the irritation index. Some of our products are not the highest quality compared to locals and competitors in the market. We raise prices too quickly. We let the value delta get too large and so shortages develop in the showroom (customers have to wait for product to arrive). We carry too many product classes.
So the results are in from my run at Legacy Brand Scenario. I finished the sub-goals of 10 products and 20 products, which as you might expect trashed my loyalty. I had furniture expertise, and then branched out into apparel, leather goods, and footwear (plus 5 semi products), so I was only split across 2 mega classes. However for the longest time I had imported relabeled backpacks and televisions into one city, so that put this city at 4 mega classes and by far the worst loyalty.
I found that in a scenario like this where you are forced into diversification, it's best just to designate one non-important city as the brand dumping grounds and put all your extra product classes into that city alone. I had started in the city with the lowest wage index, so did a lot of my manufacturing there as well as retail in all the diverse product groups. My other 4 cities stayed strictly in furniture products, and so their loyalty stayed mostly high (finished about as high as when the game started, but each city drifted in different directions). The dumping city had 0 to negative brand loyalty. I was also very careful not to let the AI sell my retail products and trash my loyalty accidentally.
Because the furniture brand has such high margins, often I was able to cross ship finished product to other cities and still make good profit. So this allowed a strategy of many global and regional warehouses to stock plenty of product and keep the stores' showrooms full. Keeping my value index close to the locals kept my margin very high and growth manageable. I kept a tech lead on core furniture products and thus enjoyed a monopoly in the class for nearly every city/product combination.
In Capitalism, there are a lot of things we do (or more often don't do) to augment the irritation index. Some of our products are not the highest quality compared to locals and competitors in the market. We raise prices too quickly. We let the value delta get too large and so shortages develop in the showroom (customers have to wait for product to arrive). We carry too many product classes.
So the results are in from my run at Legacy Brand Scenario. I finished the sub-goals of 10 products and 20 products, which as you might expect trashed my loyalty. I had furniture expertise, and then branched out into apparel, leather goods, and footwear (plus 5 semi products), so I was only split across 2 mega classes. However for the longest time I had imported relabeled backpacks and televisions into one city, so that put this city at 4 mega classes and by far the worst loyalty.
I found that in a scenario like this where you are forced into diversification, it's best just to designate one non-important city as the brand dumping grounds and put all your extra product classes into that city alone. I had started in the city with the lowest wage index, so did a lot of my manufacturing there as well as retail in all the diverse product groups. My other 4 cities stayed strictly in furniture products, and so their loyalty stayed mostly high (finished about as high as when the game started, but each city drifted in different directions). The dumping city had 0 to negative brand loyalty. I was also very careful not to let the AI sell my retail products and trash my loyalty accidentally.
Because the furniture brand has such high margins, often I was able to cross ship finished product to other cities and still make good profit. So this allowed a strategy of many global and regional warehouses to stock plenty of product and keep the stores' showrooms full. Keeping my value index close to the locals kept my margin very high and growth manageable. I kept a tech lead on core furniture products and thus enjoyed a monopoly in the class for nearly every city/product combination.