My business is failing what should I do?

[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?

[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)

[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

[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.

[counting]

This is a nice trick, I'll link this one to Capitalism Strategies and Tricks Collections post.

[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]

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.

[counting]

I'll do it, and it's actually more versatile than just one warehouse 8 products 1 ads. You can have different combination as you like. I'll list the most simple variations from 1 media firm to 3 media firms inside one "warehouse showroom" to advertise 8, 6, and 4 different type of products. (You can try all the different layout as you like, the permutations are huge)

warehouse_showroom1.jpg (183.06 KiB) Viewed 4121 times

warehouse_showroom2.jpg (181.87 KiB) Viewed 4121 times

warehouse_showroom3.jpg (175.39 KiB) Viewed 4121 times

[jondonnis]

Thats why I was getting confused because you're essentially bringing in a chunk of stock you wont sell, just to do the advetising

I guess you could see it as backup stock which you could sell later but isnt this a little cheaty? Maybe they should implement advertising agencies for this purpose.

[counting]

Warehouses have many uses, just check my Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collection post. Espeically williet4038 on the warehouse utlitization, he already did an intro on using warehouses a long time ago. General idea is that warehouse is not a "storage facility", but a logistic unit to help smoothing production cycle, integrate production and supply from multiple upstream to multiple downstream, and prevent fluctuations. Especially when the demand are huge, and hundreds of stores in multiple cities need to be supplied with many many factories.