The Marketing system (to be developed) discussion thread

[cliffski]

I thought I should start a thread to discuss the #1 feature everyone wants to go in next (and this is a big one so it will take a few weeks) and that is marketing. These are my initial thoughts, and I value your input to make them better:


Marketing will have a process tech thats unlocked under 'administration'. This merely let you build a marketing facility(or more than one). These work very similarly to research points, in that they generate marketing ideas on a constant basis. (Maybe ideas is a bad term...we need something...)

A new screen lets you see how many marketing ideas you have, and spend them (along with actual money) to run marketing campaigns.

There are different types of marketing campaign, such as online, social media, TV, billboards, magazines etc. They have to be unlocked as research in the normal R&D screen.

Each campaign has a target demographic, which will be one of the sales categories of Budget, Mid-range, Expensive or Luxury.

There are two types of campaign in each demographic:

Awareness Campaigns
These make more people aware of your company and your range. They will increase the number of customers each hour that visit your showrooms, desiring a look at the specific sales-category of car you are promoting. You will do this when you start bumping up against the natural capacity of customers in that price range.

Branding Campaigns
These increase the perceived value of your cars. They effectively add a certain amount to the value of each car which you can see as a brand bonus on cars in that price range. The effect wears off steadily after the campaign ends.

As competition from your rivals goes up, the price of all the ad campaigns will also rise. There will be some fuzzy-randomness around the effectiveness of each campaign.

Thoughts? Remember it needs to be kept reasonable in scope, as its only one part of a bigger game. We don't have quality and recalls and mid-line QA in there yet :D

[ker2x]

My suggestion in 2 category : pricing, advertising.

-------------------------

i'd like to have a better understanding of the pricing.

The developper of "automation game" posted about your game (and i bought it :D), you may want to take a look at the "lite campaign" of the "automation game" : the markerting side (what to build, for what demograpic, at which price) is genius.

in production line i'm currently making tons of feature that are "very rare", but not doing some feature that became common in the luxury market, so i guess i'm building a mid-range/expensive car right now.

but the "market price" of the stuff i make seems to have dropped even if it's still very rare (even in luxury car) and my salesman/marketing department sell the car in the "budget" price category :o

-------------------------

About the advertising side of the game : The game "Transport tycoon" in which you can run advertising campaign. You can run the campaign in different media (paper media, tv, radio, ...) and each media have its demographic target.

Same for the game "capitalism 2" if i remember correctly.

upgrading the showroom could also be something to be considered.
A commoner (like me) won't go in a luxury showroom because it imply a massive premium in the price (real or not, probably real because a showroom cost a lot). and vice-versa.

--------------------------

My 2 suggestion imply a few things :
- a "showroom" feature, which may be too time consuming for a small dev team.
- VERY IMPORTANT : a better ingame understanding of the economic (or is it bugged ? dunno), because advertising without pricing is kind of pointless.
- since we have competitors, it would be nice to know the (again) pricing of the competition, and the car's features.
- we also have to know the demographic. should i build budget ? luxury ? how's the world economy ? should i focus on high volume budget car, or low volume luxury car ?

Anyway... economy first, then advertising.

*hugs*

[cliffski]

Yup, currently the player has little understanding of what they *should* be building, but hopefully the next update (tomorrow!) should improve that a bit with this new feature:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/591370/discussions/0/1368380934238903951/

[ker2x]

Originally posted by cliffski:

Yup, currently the player has little understanding of what they *should* be building, but hopefully the next update (tomorrow!) should improve that a bit with this new feature:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/591370/discussions/0/1368380934238903951/

amazing ! <3

[nutbarz]

Right now, I have a very hard time keeping a car selling for more than a budget price, even when fully loaded with all the accessories. The prices seem to depreciate very rapidly as you play the game, even when they are still listed as very rare.

I think that the marketing could run for a period of 30, 60, or 90 days in the game, and like on a real sticker price, there is always a fee added to each vehicle for marketing. With a reminder that pops up telling you your campaign will expire in 3 days, 1 day, etc. And when that campaign ends, that fee would disappear from the sticker.

I like the 2 aspects of marketing, either for the Model, or the Brand. I would think the Brand marketing would be easier to research/obtain, but would have a higher cost to implement. While the Model would take longer, but be cheaper to implement. Just my thoughts on that.

[ker2x]

Originally posted by nutbarz:

Right now, I have a very hard time keeping a car selling for more than a budget price, even when fully loaded with all the accessories. The prices seem to depreciate very rapidly as you play the game, even when they are still listed as very rare.

I think that the marketing could run for a period of 30, 60, or 90 days in the game, and like on a real sticker price, there is always a fee added to each vehicle for marketing. With a reminder that pops up telling you your campaign will expire in 3 days, 1 day, etc. And when that campaign ends, that fee would disappear from the sticker.

I like the 2 aspects of marketing, either for the Model, or the Brand. I would think the Brand marketing would be easier to research/obtain, but would have a higher cost to implement. While the Model would take longer, but be cheaper to implement. Just my thoughts on that.

Yep. And managing multiple production line (and upgrade/install coherence) is super difficult.

I found that if you hover the mouse over the cars in your stock you can see some %age : price too high, price too low, wrong body type, poor value for money, ...

But, like you, anything over "budget" is really difficult to sell, and considering the rate at which competitors make a feature "common" managing the pricing is even more difficult.
That why i made a a second line to build "compact body type, featureless (except common rarity)" cars with high efficiceny (less than 4mn per car).

My SUV main production line (mid/high range) should produce a basic body type but it's really difficult to manage the upgrade/installation.

My budget car at budget price sell more than my high end SUV and budget price ...

So it seems that the market can be saturated and you can't really mass produce expensive car and expect to sell all of them at a price higher than "budget".

That's why we need indicator explained in my first post.
Some stuff seems to be implemented but hidden to us (market/economic/demographic/... anything impacting a sweet price spot)

edit : i raised the SUV price to have a ~50/50% price too high/too low (mid range price). i didn't sell a single car and quickly piled over 50 car in stock, which sucked a lot of my capital.

[cliffski]

I agree that the pricing model for features definitely needs to change, I suspect a lot of features are just too darned cheap right now. However, there are a lot of potential 'high-end' features that are not in the game yet, like leather seats, and interior cabin lighting, leather steering wheel, high-end speakers for entertainment etc. Once all of that is in, the price of fully-featured cars should rise a bit. I might even nudge up some of the feature prices for todays update.

[Smiler_FDL]

Nice update, but still the marketing doesn't explain much. I have no clue why my market share is 13 % in budget and doesn't seem to change. I can't sell cars in budget, even if they have very rare features and the competition seems to implement features only in luxury.
If 70 % of my customers say the price range is too low (other 30 % don't like sedans), I assume they look for higher category cars. If I increase the price into medium or expensive cars I even sell less (maybe because of the lower "fixed" market share), which leaves me puzzled.
From my point of view at first the player needs to get more information how demand and customer choice is simulated, to be able to make marketing decisions.
The production and research is already well established and I'm looking forward how the game will evolve as it has a lot potential to be an excellent car production sim.

[ker2x]

My guess is : you have too many features in your budget car.

I have 2 production line :
- mid-range (my original production line, a complete mess)
- budget (a new shiny line)

I keep the feature of my budget car as restricted as possible even if i can build them since i already researched them.

mid-range sedan : $36k (10% premium)
mid-range SUV : $38k (10% premium)
budget compact : $17k (0% premium, it raise the price to $19k with a 10 premium)

I can lower the price of my budget my removing feature, i added some "rare" feature in my budget line.

Can make a save, remove all "very rare" feature and see how it sells ?
I think the budget car need to / must only have "universal" and "common" feature, maybe a rare or 2 for increased margin.

While waiting for more documentation/explanation/panels, we need to do some trial and errors. (i'm at save file number 38 :D)

[Armageddon]

A lot of sim games use marketing to increase your sales with no detriment if you can't fullfill the demand. It would make it pretty dynamic if you simply put in a brand/market share decline if you overuse your marketing campaigns to increase revenue when you can't fill all the orders/customers in the showroom per hour.

This would prevent people from simply running campaigns all the time which then just makes it a chore instead of a tool.

[cliffski]

Just updating this to say that a patch on Sunday will add researchable marketing which unlocks marketing facilities (which then generate 'ideas') but the actual gameplay for it will not be finalised until the next patch.