Questions about marketing

[dery899]

Hello,

I've been playing airwaysim for quite a bit now but this is my first time facing stiff competition... That's what I get for choosing HKG as base airport. Anyhow, I would like to ask the gurus here if marketing is really that important? I mean, I read the manual and it states that one should always have marketing campaigns.

Currently I increased my marketing expenditure to 8mil per week for an airline that makes 60mil in revenue. It is starting to hurt my profit margin, which has fallen to just 5-8%, too low for me. Although that has allowed me to reach 77% company image in a short while, reason being that I am facing stiff competition from a guy with CI of 96%....

Question. Am I spending too much on marketing? Should I cut it down? Or is there a way to save on marketing while maintaining high company image and competing with him effectively?

Cheers!
Derick

[groundbum2]

you can get to 90% Ci by running 5 separate advertising campaigns, one for tv, one for internet etc, all the lowest cost option which is HQ city only I think.

High CI really helps for first and business traffic, from HKG this is important so I'd be using the above hack. But no way spend 10% of revenue on marketing. Route marketing also helps CI, so if you have a pipeline of new routes opening over then next few years consider doing some route marketing. And 90 CI is more than enough, you'll see next to no difference in load factor between CI 90 and CI 100.

Your credit rating also depends on CI, you won't get AAA example with a CI less than, I think 60, no matter how much profit you make.

Simon

[dery899]

Hey Simon,

Thanks for the reply, it's really helpful  and I will try to implement this.

[Tuckernut]

One quick calculation I use is that marketing should be about 5% of your gross income. However, I have found that investing more in the early stages of a game can pay off quickly so I probably bump it up a few percent. To pay for it, say I started the game with 2 A321's with some reasonably good cargo available. I will raise my cargo rates (but not passengers) by about 5% to offset the cost.

Cheers!

Tuckernut