My business is failing what should I do?

Post here if you have any strategy tips to share
jondonnis
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My business is failing what should I do?

Post by jondonnis »

Changed the crap title. Would be good, if people have the time and know how to create a thread where people could post their in game company issues and maybe the save file and the experts can along and give advice.

I'm no expert so prob couldn't give advice but I might start the ball rolling once I get home.

I've started a new game and decided to just concentrate on farms and mainly frozen food. Doing well with this but there are a couple of supermarkets where i appear to be selling well yet the store is still making a lose. I've also moved into cigarettes and cigars but despite advertising my brand for them in some stores isn't going up.

http://ge.tt/3XAxhZr1/v/0?c - Save File

Convenience Store, Beijing. Appears to be losing just over $2mill in the last 12 months yet my supply of my products in store are low so I assume that means they are selling yet the store still appears to be losing money.

Also I'm advertising at $50k per months (maybe where the lose is? Been so long possibly forgotten how to read these screens), yet the brand for my Cigarettes and Cigars isn't changing. I thought advertising affected brand rating?

Image
Last edited by jondonnis on Mon Aug 18, 2014 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Camio
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by Camio »

This seems like a pricing issue (for your firms non-existent profit)... But more on that in a bit.

I'd be curious to know your brand awareness and brand loyalty (which gives you your brand total you see there). To find that out, go in products, select the product you wanna see (so Cola, cigs or meat) and check whats your brand awareness. This is the rating affected by advertisement. I usually max advertisement for a product in the first month or 2 to get that rating to 80, just to maintain my brand awareness around 80 while my brand loyalty picks up. At that point, I keep advertising at 50-100k or so a month for a product, per media. When brand loyalty + brand awareness total gives me 100+ in brand, I can start dropping the advertisement to drop brand awareness while maintaining a 100 rating in brand, thanks to my brand loyalty raising all the time.

Please note that I advertise for a product in the 3 medias at once, per city, at all time. I use warehouses to do that (3 warehouses per city for advertisement, 1 media per warehouse, you can advertise 8 products at once using that system. Its simple and leaves my factories and retails stores slots open for more important things, like production and sales ;)

I avoid letting a product overall getting too high as this means the price isnt high enough. You dont want, as its your case here, to have a city overall that high, as its a pain to get it down later on once you control the market (dropping price little by little to make your overall, and therefore the city's overall drop, then you drop the price some more, etc...). From 90 ish to 60 or so would make a while and alot of management, or you can just hike the price a big chunk at once and be done with it. In that case tho, you'd suffer a huge brand loyalty penalty (I'd avoid doing that).

I'm not exactly sure how low you can get your product's overall in general (while keeping it above the city's overall) without getting a penalty in brand loyalty. I'll be checking that in my current game. I know at 60, you wont have a problem at all (meaning brand loyalty wont begin to drop, from whatever number you previously had, as long as you keep your product's overall above the city's overall by 2-3 at least.

From that screenshoot, I can tell you dropped the prices early on to gain market shares and didnt rose the prices back up once you were controlling the market. You now end up with products netting a minimal profit margin. A better way to get a new market isnt to drop the prices (to avoid the issues you got right now later on) but to to an ads blitz, just to get your brand awareness to at least 80 in no time. This'll help your product's overall alot (always depends on the importance of brand % for a given product: for example, the brand % for cola is usually over 40%, up to 48% in some cities) This means you'll be able top raise the price alot as soon as your brand awareness gets near 80 or so. Just rise the price top get your product's overall down to 60 or so.

This of course always depends if you got competition for market shares in the city. Dont drop your product's overall below your competition product's overall ;)

I normally net about 4-5m (profit) easily in a 4m city by the end of the first year or so with a convenience store selling Colas (3 purchases inputs, 5 sales and 1 ads unit, which becomes a 6th sales unit later on when I began using warehouses, when money allows). I also normally build 2 conv. stores in big city (4m) so thats 4m $ x2, so 8M profit at least per month in a big city.

Considering the bars you got there, its obvious you cant meet the demand on any of the products. Baring the fact its not a supply issue from your factories, I suggest raising the prices. Do that while checking your brand loyalty. You'll need to add retail stores also to keep up with the demand. However, fix your prices first. Useless to open other retail stores, this wont fix your profit issue. This is a pricing issue here.
counting
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by counting »

Actually the profit issue in this particular store is simply supply inefficient. Your can not expect to supply so many stores in so many cities with just 1 factory line to each product. When linking to a source, remember to check if the red bar (demand) is higher than the yellow bar (supply), otherwise as you can see in the picture, purchasing and sales units are just empty and idle doing nothing most of the time. If you detect a unit is under-supply, you better find a source that actually can supply products. (in you case, you would need additional factories/farms for all your products)

The brand rating issue, a particular media firm has a "limit" of exposure depend on the budget you set (it's what CPM means, spend less, less customers are exposed to ads, and higher the CPM price, cost more for each customer exposure at one time), and also the media firm's rating points will set a hard cap of how high the portion of customers can be exposed by this media firm (even if you pay the max advertisement). Usually, if your product quality and price is good enough, the loyalty will arise slowly over time when you have enough market share (you can think of it like a non-media advertisement, where market share is the "rating points").

As to how "low" you can set the rating and not hurting the brand loyalty, in a previous discussion, David said the price does matter. From personal experience the threshold is around 30-40 rating for normal products at 30 quality (pasture products usually a bit higher than 40) at normal local competent, the lower the quality the higher the rating has to be to prevent loyalty drops. And since it's also related to local rating, if the local rating is low enough, you can also get away with low rating, if local rating is high, you also need to set it higher. For newly developed products without a market at all, it's even conceivable to get away with -100 rating (obviously there's no local rating to begin with, however the demand will be very very low, and not a long term solution when AI catch up in tech)
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jondonnis
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by jondonnis »

Thanks for the replies. I'm interested in the warehouse advertising idea. How do you lay that out?

Anyone else with business issue please post :)
Camio
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by Camio »

The ideal layout, once you have plenty of money is, for each warehouses: 8 inputs with advertisement in the middle. 3 warehouses per city, 1 for each media. For one city, that can fully cover 8 products in all 3 medias in a city. If you have more products, simply repeat the same system, adding more warehouses.

Its a very simply system. This frees up your factories and retails stores for other stuff. Considering warehouses are cheap (to build and monthly cost too), this isnt an expensive way actually.
Of course, at the start, its best to put your ads in retail stores or factories.
jondonnis
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by jondonnis »

I don't understand that layout. If you have 8 products coming into the warehouse and advertising in the middle then you have no space for the output meaning you cant sell the products.
Camio
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by Camio »

You dont have to sell it. These warehouses are used only for advertising. You sell your products in normal retail stores.

Only difference here is all advertisement is done in a warehouse, whose sole purpose is that.
counting
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by counting »

This is a nice trick, I'll link this one to Capitalism Strategies and Tricks Collections post.
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WilliamMGary
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by WilliamMGary »

Changed the crap title. Would be good, if people have the time and know how to create a thread where people could post their in game company issues and maybe the save file and the experts can along and give advice.
I thought this would be a good idea so I created a "Business Consulting" section on CapitalismFans.com but you have to have the same v. of the game if using Beta releases.
WilliamMGary
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Re: My business is failing what should I do?

Post by WilliamMGary »

Camio wrote:You dont have to sell it. These warehouses are used only for advertising. You sell your products in normal retail stores.

Only difference here is all advertisement is done in a warehouse, whose sole purpose is that.
A screen shot explaining it might be helpful to him.
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