Traffic/Marketing/Promotion

[DavidEstesCreations]

Let’s talk about traffic, marketing, and promotion for a moment.

Traffic:
Each building has a base “traffic” number. That indicates how many people might happen to walk by without any extra effort, and that makes sense.

This number cannot be changed, but it would be nice for that to be dynamic: several successful stores in the area could increase base traffic, and several bad stores could decrease it over time.

Marketing:
You pay for ads and you get promotion. Small, Medium, and Large billboards make sense - larger ones get more attention than smaller ones. The digital ads are cutely named (parodies of real companies), although it really doesn’t seem to matter which “company” you choose, it’s more about how many “impressions” you pick.

It would be cool if the different digital platforms mattered. Maybe their popularity could fluctuate over time, so you might need to switch to a different site every so often.

Promotion:
Here’s where it gets less clear. Overall Promotion is the average of Traffic and Marketing, which doesn’t really make sense to me. I think it should be the sum of the two numbers.

I feel the “Traffic” should be the baseline for Promotion since that’s your base Traffic. A lack of Marketing shouldn’t decrease how many people randomly pass by and come in.

Building A has 15% Traffic.
Building B has 55% Traffic.

With no Marketing, Building B has 40% more Traffic than Building A, but only 20% more Promotion. This seems odd, since 40% random traffic should generate 40% more possible people that come in.

The current averaging system means you will never reach 100% promotion, and a higher base-level traffic actually makes promotion appear less effective.

Using 100% Marketing, Building A has 58% Promotion (43% increase over its 15% base Traffic), but Building B has 78% Promotion (23% increase over its 55% base Traffic).

If Promotion were a sum of Marketing and Traffic, it would be clearer on how each thing is impacting your customers.

Additional Ways to boost Promotion
In addition to Marketing, you could buy/rent cheap add-ons like a sidewalk sign or hire a “Sign Spinner” to stand outside and drive customers in.

[Jonas]

Hey Dave!

Sorry for the late reply, wanted to take my time with this.

@DavidEstesCreations

Here’s where it gets less clear. Overall Promotion is the average of Traffic and Marketing, which doesn’t really make sense to me. I think it should be the sum of the two numbers.

When I read this I was like “but it’s not…”. Then I checked the source code and found a bug Total promotion should have been be: trafficIndex (up to around 50%) + (marketingPercentage / 2), allowing any building above 50% traffic index to reach a total of 100% promotion.

So in your example, Building A would have 15% promotion, and Building B would have 55%. We’ll have that fixed ASAP.

On top of this, we realized very few players understood or even used marketing, although it should have quite a heavy impact. Therefore we already planned an update to marketing:

Here’s a look into the machine room:

"SPOILER: Shows actual game calculations

As you can see, marketing is becoming much simpler and transparent, but will still require some tinkering around, to get the most efficient setup.

Outdoor marketing/decorations would be awesome, but that’s probably more of a post-release thing

[DavidEstesCreations]

@Jonas

trafficIndex (up to around 50%) + (marketingPercentage / 2)

That equation makes much more sense overall!

Therefore we already planned an update to marketing

Thanks for the info - I really like the planned update. It looks like it will allow you to have more control/transparency of your marketing - much easier to see what you need to reach 100% promotion, and you have to be a little more discerning about how you mix and match the options.

A couple thoughts about the prices under the spoiler tag:

Pricing calculations based on the "Spoiler Numbers"

The pricing is interesting - the larger space you want to cover, the less efficient marketing is (if I am understanding correctly).

I think that makes sense - marketing reaches a saturation point and the costs rise disproportionately the higher you are trying to go. However, I think the price of the small billboard is too cheap, personally, and makes certain combinations significantly cheaper/more efficient:

Small Internet: $5 / sqm.
Medium Internet: $6.25 / sqm.
Large Internet: $8 / sqm.
Small Billboard: $5 / sqm.
Medium Billboard: $10 / sqm.
Large Billboard: $10 / sqm.

I think Small Billboards should be closer to $7.5-$10 / sqm to keep with the flow of the others ($750-$1000 per day). $750 still allows it to be slightly more efficient than the best internet without being drastically lower than everything else. $1000 puts it on par with medium/large, considering that those two are the same price / meter already.

But that’s just my opinion. Otherwise, I really like the planned update!

Outdoor marketing/decorations would be awesome, but that’s probably more of a post-release thing

To the many years of Big Ambitions yet to come!

[RPGforYOU]

I also think a pie chart might make it more clear to people there’s a promotional max. Right now you have 2 elements. Traffic Index(TI) and Marketing(M) and they both have a % value and a theoretical max of 100 %. Then you have your main promotion % which is an average of those 2.

My idea would be to do a Pie chart:

So traffic index would be your baseline. (And currently there’s nothing to increase or decrease this.) Then in order to get maximal promotion potential of your store it should take you more marketing in a lower TI store than a higher TI store. BUT the marketing cost should be exponential greater from low to high. Meaning if your TI is 25 % you should be able to get to 75 % promotion level for $ 100 per day. And from 75 % to 100 % it should be an extra $ 100 per day. So if your TI is 75 % it should still cost you $ 100 to get to 100 %. But it shouldn’t ‘punish’ you too much when your TI is low/very low.

Now this is all very simplified … but it would keep it clear to people that there is 1 promotional value to get to 100 % and not have this weird third blue bar which probably not allot of people understand why it’s there and where the number comes from lol. Just my 2 cents on the subject.