[-] Marketing spending bugged to some extent

[Tha_Ape]

Hi,

half feature request, half bug.

GW#4 - I'm at 90 CI (between 89.7 and 90.1) and launched a new general campaign to reach/go closer to 100. Been running for 2 months. The amount is 2.3mm/week, ie close to my initial campaigns, 13 years ago. And I noticed no effect at all.

I know marketing gets more and more expensive as you grow, and that you need to spend more to get less, and I'm ok with this. I also know that current campaigns' cost grows, but only slightly, and that a new one has to be quite larger than the previous. I also know that the higher you go, the harder it gets to reach.

However I feel that adding 25% financial capacities in this domain and having not a single tenth of point of increase is not normal.

Thank you.

[Sami]

Your latest campaign with only newspapers/internet has a low reach. It does have an effect but it's only about 0.1pts from what I gather from the database, and at this CI level you just need a higher spending.

[Tha_Ape]

I understand it's working as planned, however the "planned in the system vs spendings vs old spendings" doesn't makes sense. I increased my spendings by 25% and (from what you and only you can see) the result is a 0.1 increase in CI?

I agree on the principle that we have to spend more and more as we grow, that's just fair. But +25% total money for a +0.1% increase in CI is crazy.

So either the cost of already-running campaigns has to be revised upwards, or the increase in CI from new campaigns.

Edit: plus, I've always been told (and even by you, iirc), that only the total amount of money counts, not the type of campaign nor the area targeted. If it is not so, please correct me.

[groundbum2]

I've noticed the same, that spending is almost in "bands". I'll make some numbers up. Spend $1M and you're in the 0-5M band. So up your spend to 4.99M and there's next to no increase in CI. But go to 5.1 in the 5M-20M band and CI goes up nicely. But then to go up again you have to go above the 20M into the next band etc. And the bands aren't equal sizes, they get bigger in an exponential fashion. So it's very very very hard, and expensive to get CI100. In fact only elite (cough) seem to manage it.

Simon

[gazzz0x2z]

In fact only elite (cough) seem to manage it.

Mmmmh, nope. I manage it only when I'm a huge company. My 700 Saab2000s in current GW3 don't give me enough size to go over CI 90, for example. Only huge companies manage CI 100, and I don't see the problem. That's realistic. Only huge companies are known worldwide. And many non-Elite huge companies are at CI 100(right now in GW3, Elite has exactly 50% of those, 11/22, considering the amount of huge companies we have, that's just not related to the alliance, but to the overall performance).

OTOH, the "band" effect is indeed rather counter-intuitive, and more linearity would be welcome in my book. It would be harder to manage(CI would go down in winter because of more cancellations), but the effect would be still more intuitive to understand.

[Tha_Ape]

OTOH, the "band" effect is indeed rather counter-intuitive, and more linearity would be welcome in my book. It would be harder to manage(CI would go down in winter because of more cancellations), but the effect would be still more intuitive to understand.

This. Indeed. 25% for 0.1%, or a ratio of 250 to 1 is really far from intuitive as the initial 90 CI was reached with a ratio of almost 1 to 1.