I don't think it's a bad idea but I also don't completely agree with this concept that you propose of advertising per country.
While it's generally true that big companies advertise throughout a country, this is usually only because they are capable of doing so and have business in every corner of the country (like coca-cola). Smaller businesses will advertise more locally (city level) and even larger companies will limit their advertisements to the actual area that they are operating in. Perhaps you want to heavily advertise in LA and the west coast but not in NYC and the east coast as you have no business there for example. The current system allows for flexibility in that regard.
When I first started playing it didn't make sense to me that when I advertised in LA it didn't cross over into advertisement in NYC but eventually it clicked with me. It does actually make sense the way it is done now. If you want to advertise per country, all you got to do is have an advertisement unit in every city
What the game could really use are ways to spice up advertisement and brand in some of the following ways:
Firm Brand Rating: A brand rating not for products but for the firm type that you are using. Setting up large chains of supermarkets in a city and advertising for them would yield more loyal customers that gravitate towards your store. This is already simulated partially due to the demand bonus from having multiple stores in a city, but having advertisement specifically target the chain itself as an added bonus provides another layer of complexity. This way heavy competition might erupt between different companies over which supermarket chain is the superior one
Advertisement Risks: Every season or so you got to roll the dice basically and see how well your marketing department actually performed in creating appropriate adds
sometimes you just got a fiasco on your hands making you drop points in brand loyalty because someone thought it a great idea to turn your advertisement into a horror flick.
link:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... s3+baby+ad
And other times you may have a banger of an add on your hands and increase loyalty more than you'd get out of ordinary advertisement, making your brand the top dog for that period boosting sales and giving you the definitive advantage in the market for possibly years to come.
More 'dynamic brand' would also be welcome. You shouldn't necessarily need to advertise in order to get brand awareness and brand loyalty if you are already in possession of a large market share. When every Smartphone is a BrutusCorp Smartphone you'd think people would have figured out that BrutusCorp makes Smartphones and if people were happy with the product they should accumulate loyalty for the corporation/brand. This would provide interesting benefits to companies who get their foot into the market early and requires newcomers to crack the market open through advertisement. Advertisement should also be more dynamic in this regard in that products with large brand awareness may attract/cater a larger market share however it shouldn't influence the overall rating as much as brand loyalty does for example. While currently in-game in the long term brand loyalty is more powerful than brand awareness, the way you can cheese brand rating early by just pumping cash into brand awareness and then raising prices is really gimmicky and kind of boring.
Negative brand loyalty is not nearly as painful as it should be in the game. All negative brand loyalty does is provide a small negative number to the maximum brand rating you can have. I personally have never seen a competitor actually lose significant market share because of negative brand loyalty. It's just a small debuff to their overall rating meaning they'll just lower price a bit more to get the rating and marketshare back up again.
To modify and add to your idea a bit, if cities were linked to each other through 'countries', advertising may leak into other cities overtime with a certain modifier. If you heavily advertised in LA for example and had 100 brand rating there but nothing in NYC, some of that brand may spill over into NYC anyway and provide brand there without advertisement spending due to word of mouth, travel and migration.
Also something which you may enjoy more would be a dedicated ''marketing firm'' that you can setup advertisement units for which allows you to advertise in every city you want to advertise in at the same time. This would take away a lot of the tedious advertisement jobs you'd have to do as a player but might be too game-changing if it were implemented in such a manner.
Oops well I wrote too much again
