ceomoses wrote:The reason I was wanting a different price in one of my stores in each city is because even though all of my stores are profitable with the COO, I'm having trouble getting the market share I need to complete the scenario. The lead competitor has half the stores I do, but he's selling his products at a loss to keep his lead.
My plan is to have one store in each city have 1 purchasing unit and 2 sales units for each product that I need to dominate in able to complete the scenario. In this store, I would sell my products at cost to the retail store, which puts my rating well above average in that store and would draw enough demand and customers in it for me to take the lead. I would be taking a small loss in that particular store, but the profits from the other stores would make up for it, in addition to completing the scenario much more quickly.
I wonder how effective this uneven price tactic actually is, the effectiveness should depend on how many customers you draw from both AIs and your own stores to your cheapest store. You would lose some profit and gain some market share (initially), but for AI's situation it's hard to tell.
High aggressiveness AI would try to match your highest rating store, thus the market share you gain overall initially might go back to AI's control again after the price war starts again. But this process would take a while, so unless you could do this to all your products that fall behind in market share a bit, and try to nudge the market share a bit higher from other AIs, otherwise after a couple of months, your overall market share might fall back again, if you don't match your higher price store to the cheapest price.
IMO, this is a short burst tactic as a slightly more complicated form of price war. Personally in this situation, I would try to hold on to a basic market share with the highest profit margin possible, and try to buy one of your competitor out with merger, by undercut certain product and force them into losing profit thus lowering their stock price. I would say it could be done for about a years or so with loans.
