Branding

[jondonnis]

Can someone explain how branding works again. Even after all these years its confusing. I had all my frozen chicken, beef etc all at 100 quality and for a while 100 brand.

I stopped advertising for a bit in the city where this was the case. Eventually spotted the brand had hit 0. We'll take frozen beef as an example. Dominance I'm 1st. I can even advertise for a whole month at max advertising budget and the branding doesn't even go up 1 point.

Confused.

[jondonnis]

OK I think I might have it and think I might of read it elsewhere years ago but in my mind, it doesn't make sense in the real world.

I looked at one of the cities I was setting frozen beef in. That city was still at 100 brand rating but why? Then I noticed the one that was at 0 with negative Brand Loyalty. Then realise in the supermarket that I'm selling my farm products in, I'm also selling my own house hold products. As soon as I stopped selling those in that supermarket, the brand rating for frozen beef started to go back up. I appear to be able to sell the "House Hold products" from the factory to others but if I sell it in the same supermarket that is selling Live Stock products, then the brand rating goes down.

This doesn't make sense as its a supermarket. All supermarkets sell various items, some sell quite a lot of different items that are all under their own "brand".

[jondonnis]

Nope. Still not making sense. I think part of it was the product class but now this

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How can I have much higher overall. Much more market share, yet have 0 brand on eggs. Despite having a warehouse that is importing the eggs and advertising at 8 different media companies. And none of my stores are selling eggs with any other out of class item that I own.

So my supermarket might be selling my eggs but is now also selling shampoo from another companies. When it was selling shampoo from my company, the brand was dropping I assume because of the product class difference. The brand on eggs went up briely before dropping to 0 again and refusing to increase.

Still trying different things.

Now have just the warehouse with eggs and 8 advert spots. All spending 10k each. I deleted all factories in that city of mine that where making anything else. No plastics, no socks, no shampoo, no toilet cleaner. Deleted all other goods in the supermarkets so they only sell frozen food. Now the branding is up to 100 in all the frozen goods. So I also assume, because eggs is a live stock class, you only need to advertise one of a product class to get all the others up in that class to 100?

It's very confusing and I still feel branding maybe bugged.

[jondonnis]

Reading the old capitalism 2 lab manual again and I think one of the issues here is livestock products don't really consider branding when purchasing, although you can get the items up to 100. The manual also states that if you have choosen corporate branding and are making products in different product classes, then the consumer thinks you aren't committed to one item so are less likely to buy. If that's the case, that's OK but again, we have real life supermarkets that sell several different products all under their own brand "Waitrose, Sainsbury, Tesco" extra, and people are loyal to them.

I wonder if branding needs a rework or I'm just not fully understanding it.

[David]

I will check this issue for you and provide you with an answer. Could you please send me your save game file?

[jondonnis]

I'll send the save file over shortly. I've done more testing today.

So I have a city that produces the frozen beef etc and one for eggs and frozen chicken.

Those are all 100%.

I have a factory making shampoo, toothpaste and toliet cleaner. The 2 supermarkets of mine in this one city were selling the frozen goods AND my body care and household products.

I also have a warehouse where I buy the body care and household products to, then they sell them on. All OK.

However, with this setup the 2 supermarkets are unable to up the branding on the frozen products.

So I stop selling all body care and household products of mine in ALL my supermarkets over all cities. No change, branding on frozen still won't increase.

So I now remove all body care and household products from being sold from the warehouse and I had to also stop importing products from the seaports to that same warehouse where I'd then relabel them and sell on and this appears to finally trigger the branding. Frozen products branding now starts to increase.

If I now start importing products from the seaport and relabel them and sell them from the warehouse again, the branding on the frozen products drops to 0 again.

Since I typed that I've done even futher testing. I can send my save although I've found out what the issue appears to be, which you can recreate. Its Private labelling causing the issue.

So when you look at the product you've imported to relabel as you're own, Brand Loyality is negative and no amount of advertising appears to make it increase. You can sell the items at 1cent and make lots of sales but the brand still doesn't increase. This negative effect appears to then affect all your brands. I could be wrong but this appears a bit broken, as (although I haven't tried this early game) this means relabelling items will never make you a profit and you can never use it in branding mode as the consumer seems to be aware that "You've just relabelled that".

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[jondonnis]

https://we.tl/t-6dnbhfZbR9

Save file

[jondonnis]

I forgot to add, most testing done in the city of Murry. If you use the save as that's where the warehouse is that is doing the Private labeling.

[David]

I have loaded your save game and noticed that you are using Corporate Brand strategy. The negative brand loyalty of your products is a result of inconsistent quality among your products. To maintain positive brand loyalty, you must have ALL or MOST of your products under the same corporate brand having consistently high quality.

Attached please find the documentation about corporate branding from the Cap2 manual.

[jondonnis]

I read that but probably didn't pay attention to the quality bit.

So does this then explain why the Private Labelling is causing such a negative effect? Is it because, yes, you are re labelling, but we can still see the products are of poor quality.