Poll: A new building type “Marketing Office”

[David]

A new building type “Marketing Office” so that Advertising Expenses are detached from retail stores and retail store’s profits will not be distorted by high advertising expenditures.

It will have an UI like e-Commerce, listing the products and let you assign an advertising budget to each of them.

The media firms will be added to the list and the computer will automatically distribute the advertising over those media with available advertising slots.

It also allows you to do PR campaign.

And perhaps, sponsorships on TV shows and possibly other means of marketing can be done via it as well.

[standardplayer]

• Marketing Office: Downtown Skyscraper

• Marketing Methods:
o Traditional Marketing: Print, Radio, TV Advertisements (Already in Game)
o Digital Marketing: Web Advertisements (Already in Game)
o Public Relations?
o Product Placement (Movies, TV, etc.)
o Sponsorship's:
- Sports Center Naming Rights: "X Company Name" Arena/Field
- Sporting Teams/Events: Football, Baseball, NASCAR, etc.
- Conventions and Other Events
o Celebrity Endorsements: Actors/Actresses, Sports Stars, Social Media Influencer's, etc.

• Marketing Systems:
o Campaign Strategy:
- Corporate Brand, Brand for Range of Products (Household Goods), and/or Specific Product Brand (Potential for Layered Strategies Corporate and Product Brands)
-Brand Type: Luxury, Good Value, Cost Effective (Cheap)
-Targeted Marketing: Mass Market, Niche Market, Demographics (Young (Internet) vs. Old (Traditional), Business (Print) vs. Consumer (TV, Internet), etc.), etc.

• Service DLC: Marketing/PR Agency?

[David]

Update: a related post: http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewto ... =14&t=1984

[standardplayer]

Ability to Create and Sell/Trade Specific Product or Product Range Brands between companies.

[VRBones]

One thing I'd be concerned about is that there is currently a quite clean interface to set up the advertising for a specific brand (limited choice to the products in the same store). If a marketing centre is used it would need to have a way to quickly & easily find the product to advertise. That said, the modifications to the brand improvement page (linked suggestion) look quite intuitive and I'd really like something like that for the later game rather than hunting for the one store out of 100 that has runaway advertising spends.

Another thing this will do is reduce the tactical complexity of store / warehouse setup. The choice to sacrifice 1 of 9 possible work units (especially at highly valuable land stores) or set up an advertising warehouse are enjoyable wrinkles in the game when setting up a product line.

Overall it feels a positive move forward, especially if it opens up marketing-specific enhancements in the future.

[David]

One thing I'd be concerned about is that there is currently a quite clean interface to set up the advertising for a specific brand (limited choice to the products in the same store). If a marketing centre is used it would need to have a way to quickly & easily find the product to advertise. That said, the modifications to the brand improvement page (linked suggestion) look quite intuitive and I'd really like something like that for the later game rather than hunting for the one store out of 100 that has runaway advertising spends.

Another thing this will do is reduce the tactical complexity of store / warehouse setup. The choice to sacrifice 1 of 9 possible work units (especially at highly valuable land stores) or set up an advertising warehouse are enjoyable wrinkles in the game when setting up a product line.

Overall it feels a positive move forward, especially if it opens up marketing-specific enhancements in the future.

I agree with you. It seems to me that the modifications to the brand improvement page (linked suggestion) is the best solution. I would add that the player should be required to build a marketing department in the HQ first in order to use that function. What do you think?

[VRBones]

I would add that the player should be required to build a marketing department in the HQ first in order to use that function. What do you think?

I view the HQ as a mid-game / late-game building where most of the features are quality-of-life related by removing the micromanagement or bring in effects that work at scale. If you require a HQ you're relegating the entire marketing gameplay element into the mid-game, or mandating an earlier build of the HQ to get access to this part of the game. I personally don't worry about marketing until the mid-game due to the longer ROI on marketing strategies, but it feels counter to the goals of the HQ.

If there is a requirement for a HQ, the linked suggestion of changing the CMO screen to adjust brand targets may be enough to handle the micromanagement and give a place to attach future marketing initiatives. This does leave the stores / warehouses holding the marketing cost as before, but that might be able to be moved to a "Marketing division" in the P/L upon the establishment of the CMO along with marketing-specific metrics (eg: product advertising spend per product revenue)