Marketing Department Budget/CI

[LemonButt]

There is another thread somewhere about marketing issues that I couldn't dig up, but I think I've officially "cracked" the code for marketing making it completely irrelevant, which I think is a bad thing.  Attached are screenshots from my airline in AG where my marketing expense is ~$225k on ~$385m in weekly revenue.  9/11 just happened so my CI just went down, but at this spend level after "full maturity" I'll have a 90+ CI with marketing making up just 0.08% of expenses--less than a third of my office rent.

I think the marketing system needs to be revamped to be declarative versus imperative--you give your marketing department a budget/CI amount and they spend it to achieve the outcome versus tinkering with the inputs to achieve an unknown outcome.

The current marketing campaigns are unrealistic--advertising worldwide is pointless if you aren't flying to every continent.  Ultimately IRL the marketing expenses are going to be a percentage of revenue--if you only have one flight you're going to spend more on marketing if it's an A380 versus a CRJ.  As a result, marketing expenses and CI should simply be a function of revenue.  The marketing page would simply be a slider or similar setting the percentage of revenue that is allocated to marketing--if it's set to 5% and you earn $100 in revenue, $5 will automatically be spent by your marketing department.

The simplified version of this would be each percent of revenue would have diminishing marginal returns.  Spending 1-2-3-4-5-6% of revenue would result in a CI of 25-45-65-80-90-95.  To go from 95 to 100 you'd have to be in alliance spending an additional 1% like we have already for a total expense of 7% to reach 100.  The net effect is there should be a wider "spread" of CI among airlines.  Right now I have an 85 CI and a third of the airlines in the gameworld have a higher CI than me--getting a 90+ CI is way too easy/cheap.

This would mean for my current airline with a 90 CI target, I'd be spending $19m/week on marketing (5% of revenue) versus $225k and instead of having a 26% operating margin, I'd have a 21% operating margin--still on the higher side, but marketing would actually cost something versus just being a rounding error.  This also makes it easier for airlines to pare expenses when the going gets tough with predictable effects on both CI and the bottom line.

[groundbum2]

I suppose the starting point for me would be "Is it broken". So I think you've come up with a better mousetrap, but there's nothing wrong with the current system. It does take a bit of understanding, but that's part of mastering the game. Given the near total lack of development resources for AWS, and the long list of really important requests, such as 7 day scheduling and other GUI changes, plus CBD pax and connecting pax, I wouldn't put this as high priority.

Just my imho

Simon