messer wrote: ↑Wed Apr 21, 2021 5:17 amI 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