COMPANY IMAGE

[bjflanne]

I'm just curious....does anybody have a company image over 40? In past games, I have had turnaround times on planes <5% likelihood of delay, avg fleet age < 3 years, a large airline > $100M in revenue, and <90% pax loads on my routes, yet my image never got above 40.

Am I missing something, or is image in this game like voodoo?

[Brockster]

What was your advertising like?

[Kontio]

What was your advertising like?

I think therein lies the answer. Usually players who ask questions about their low company image spend way too little on marketing. My company image is a bit above 90 but I consider that in no way extraordinary.

[iwa]

How much spending on marketing is considered adequate?

[Sigma]

Basically however much it takes to keep your image growing.

It seems to have stopping points at 40, 60, 80, and 95 in my experience.  You'll have to add additional campaigns or expand the scope of the ones you have, in order to get it moving.

It's difficult to break it into a percentage of revenues because of the differences in revenues to passenger volumes between different airlines.  An all-international airline can get by with a small percentage of their revenues, an all-regional carrier will have a difficult time affording to get it much above 60 or 80 simply because of the amount of money required in comparison to the revenues they are generating.  Marketing expenses seem to grow as a function of passenger volume and destinations rather than revenues -- so if you're a large, cheap carrier, you'll have a much harder time than the small, high-margin carrier.

For some Marketing is a fairly low expense.  For my airline which moves a very large amount of passengers but moves almost all of them within 700 miles of my hub and averages some of the lowest ticket prices in the game, Marketing is my single largest expense if I want to get it into the 90s.

[Kontio]

Basically however much it takes to keep your image growing.

It seems to have stopping points at 40, 60, 80, and 95 in my experience.  You'll have to add additional campaigns or expand the scope of the ones you have, in order to get it moving.

Exactly. Don't think about it in terms of how much money should you spend. You are spending enough when your CI is going up or staying at a level you are satisfied with. I try to keep it at about 90-95, because I think it is enough to stay competetive but isn't excessively expensive.

[yuranas]

The big question is what level of image should be considered as good enough to satisfy with.
Kontio says he keeps it at 90-95. For me, it used to be at 60 for a couple of years and now raised to 70 after I introduced TV advertising (which costs me extra 700 thous. a week)

I wonder what kind of impact an increase in CI let us say from 70 to 80 percent may have on LF.
Just because it is the only way to measure the efficiency od this spending.

Could anybody share with his experience?

[Sigma]

The impact in load factor depends on so many variables it would be difficult to quantify in anything even remotely related to "X CI gets you X LF"

Whether demand is being met or even over supplied.  Your pricing compared to competitors pricing.  And most importantly their CI versus your CI.

CI means little if you're the only airline operating the route.  Route Image seems to play more of a role in that case.  I can hit 95%+ LF with a CI of 40 as long as I'm the only one there.

What really matters is that your CI is greater than that of your competitors.  That doesn't mean that it's necessarily 100 or even 70.  Just better than the competition.  And the greater that difference, the more and more better than them yours is, the easier time you'll have of attracting their customers.  But it's the difference that matters, not the absolute CI figure that you maintain.  So how much your CI helps you changes greatly on a route-by-route basis depending on the competition and their CI compared to yours.

The big difference comes into play at 90-95 though.  At that point it seems difficult for people to steal away your LF even at sometimes significantly better pricing.  It would seem that a passengers willingness to change carriers is on a logarithmic curve, and the closer you get to 100 the exponentially more difficult it is to steal them away from that preferred carrier.

[yuranas]

Thanks a lot for a really clear explanation.