Company Image - the true meaning?

[alexgv1]

Hello all,

I was having some thoughts about Company Image (CI hereon) one day and thought I would share them here.

The question is:

Does Company Image represent the public awareness of a company, or public perception?

To clarify for those in any doubt. By public awareness I mean how big and famous your company is (e.g. everyone in the world has heard of British Airways, their CI would be 100). This makes sense as the more marketing you have the more exposure you get to the public and the higher CI goes, especially when seeing the higher influence CI has over First and Business class passengers.

However, CI can also be negative, meaning there is a chance to be famous or infamous (e.g. everyone in the world has also heard of Ryanair, but maybe for the wrong reasons so their CI could be argued to be -100). Or a negative number could also mean that nobody has heard of you, and you have a bad safety reputation (e.g. some blacklisted African and Asian airlines).

Although this is mainly a question aimed at the game development, I also welcome any other players' contributions and open this thread up to discussion.

Perhaps, in the future, there is room to separate the two, as this may be necessary with the new demand system, etc.

This is not requesting a feature, just discussing a current one and looking to the future.

----------------------------
Disclaimer: This is not a discussion of BA or Ryanair, nor is the intention to insult either, so please keep real life airline bashing to another thread.

[Dave4468]

I think it is linked more to delays, broken planes and blacklisting sort of stuff than size or anything else.

I don't think pax are clever enough (read "programmed to") give a damn about infamy in cases like Ryanair or anything like that.

[alexgv1]

But I can run an airline with old planes, always breaking down, lots of delays and still have a CI above 70. Surely it should be negative. But the pax still come to me.

The question is has anybody ran a -100 CI airline? Do they get no pax? Or lots of dissatisfied ones?



We must understand, this is not a newb question thread, but a deep philosophical discussion thread.

[GEnx]

I think it is a combination of both. In AirwaySim, one increases its CI by excessive marketing, initially increasing public awareness to draw passengers. However, an airline's increase in CI is also bound to things like flight delays, fleet age and plane condition, thus taking public reception into the mix. The only thing you could argue not being taken into account is service (i.e. passenger comfort, meal quality, IFE, etc.).

[alexgv1]

The only thing you could argue not being taken into account is service (i.e. passenger comfort, meal quality, IFE, etc.).

Good point about service, I think that is when there may be a need for the CI to be split up (e.g. another for state of aircraft, seat comfort, cabin age, IFE, meals, lounges etc.). Seeing as United has a good reputation (CI 100) but some of their planes are old and scruffy so there could be a reputation for that.

[GEnx]

Maybe, but then the question is, what would a passenger prefer? I think it is very hard to distinguish between both "versions (if you will)" of CI in terms of what matters most to the passenger since it is impossible to generalize.

[JumboShrimp]

You have positive side of CI:
- money spent

The negative side of CI are:
- strikes
- penalties
- delays (I think)
- flight cancellations (I think)

Aircraft that is not well maintained will increase delays and flight cancellations.  There could also be loss of CI for excessively old aircraft.  According to Sigma, this is may be implemented but it is minimal as of now.

So a lot of the ingredients are already implemented.

[alexgv1]

Look we are not asking what makes up CI we all know that.

We must understand, this is not a newb question thread, but a deep philosophical discussion thread.

Please RTFQ all.

Can someone not look into this and read between the lines?

[LemonButt]

Does Company Image represent the public awareness of a company, or public perception?

This is actually a very good question.  Upon further review, it almost seems like CI should be broken down into two different metrics: awareness and perception.  Awareness could be +100 (universally known), but perception could be -100 (universally hated) and vice versa -100 awareness (almost completely unknown) and +100 perception (those who do know them, love them).

Qantas would be a good example of negative awareness and positive perception.  Here in the states, there are basically zero flights and not many people know them, but those who do know Qantas know they are a very good airline to fly on.

Ryanair could be a positive awareness and negative perception.  US Airways just got voted worst US airline and have a negative perception, but they are universally known and everyone in the US has heard of them.

[JumboShrimp]

Instead of creating a new category (awareness vs. perception), I would just shift certain things from CI to RI.  Such as on-time performance, seating quality and comfort, age and quality of aircraft.

You may have a huge airline with mostly up to date aircraft, but an old wreck flying to, say Indianopolis, that keeps breaking down, and there are delays and cancellations.

Another thing is on-time performance.  Suppose the airline has most of the flights scheduled well, but one route with a tight turnaround time.  That one route should get a disproportionate penalty, rather than the whole airline.  RI is almost a non-brainer now, but IMO, it could be more reflective of how the airline is actually flying the route.

[Sigma]

I think what CI is supposed to be, is public perception -- what is customer's opinion of your company.  This is why it's so adversely affected by what would be considered negative actions -- strikes, fines, age of aircraft (supposedly), etc.

But, since it is increased directly via spending money on Marketing, it certainly makes it seem that it awareness of your company instead.  I suppose it is in an abstract or more generalized way (awareness that you even exist as a company at all), while RI is awareness that you offer service on a particular route.  I think really the only reason one has to spend so much money to increase and maintain it is simply a game mechanic designed as a money sink as your airline gets larger, not because it's supposed to really indicate 'getting the word out' about your company.

If the goal was to keep RI/CI distinctly unique, then I think RI should be the "awareness" number and CI the "reputation" number.  This is not only a bit more logical in my opinion, but would require more effort in regards to maintaining one's marketing numbers.  It would be completely untenable the way RI costs are calculated today, but that could be changed, along with how it is earned (simply flying it only getting you so far to 100, regular expenditures being required to get it higher), have it earned MUCH more slowly, and increase the magnitude with which it affects LF (so that an RI of 80 and RI of 100 are appreciably different).  CI would be earned without any direct expenditures at all and instead by wholly based on various service and quality metrics, but would be hugely impacted by negative actions.  

It would be ideal if this could be granular enough to have seperate CI/reputation on given routes, so that, as JumboShrimp mentions, if your customers in Indianapolis are tired of dealing with the old POS plane you use there, that would affect that route more severely with customers on that route and New York wouldn't care at all (until that plane crashed or got hit with some big FAA fine).  But I think that would be fairly difficult, and if we increased the effect that using such crappy planes had on the CI as a whole, the effect would be the same, albeit spread across all your routes.  Ultimately, the incentive to fix the problem that should be there, is there.

As a small aside, RI and CI should have pop-ups similar to Alliance Score, where you can see the positive and negative affects your actions have on them.

[Jps]

Instead of creating a new category (awareness vs. perception), I would just shift certain things from CI to RI.  Such as on-time performance, seating quality and comfort, age and quality of aircraft.

You may have a huge airline with mostly up to date aircraft, but an old wreck flying to, say Indianopolis, that keeps breaking down, and there are delays and cancellations.

Another thing is on-time performance.  Suppose the airline has most of the flights scheduled well, but one route with a tight turnaround time.  That one route should get a disproportionate penalty, rather than the whole airline.  RI is almost a non-brainer now, but IMO, it could be more reflective of how the airline is actually flying the route.

I really like this. It seems like the logical step to take for the RI.

Like Jumbo said, the RI is pretty useless right now, and there isn't even a thing that would lower it from 100, except not flying the route.

Also, if this was implemented, how RI affects the route should be changed a little. So that with 0 RI you would get less than 10% pax, for example. This would reflect reality so that if you start flying with RI 0 (no1 has heard of you opening the route), most people wouldn't know about it. But, if you market for the route for example a week or two before, you could raise the RI so that you could get full planes from the beginning.

[alexgv1]

I really like this. It seems like the logical step to take for the RI.

Like Jumbo said, the RI is pretty useless right now, and there isn't even a thing that would lower it from 100, except not flying the route.

Also, if this was implemented, how RI affects the route should be changed a little. So that with 0 RI you would get less than 10% pax, for example. This would reflect reality so that if you start flying with RI 0 (no1 has heard of you opening the route), most people wouldn't know about it. But, if you market for the route for example a week or two before, you could raise the RI so that you could get full planes from the beginning.

+1 to all said by jumbo, sigma and jps. This is really positive discussion, thanks. If you were to separate perception and awareness, it makes sense to change it to CI and RI as these are already in place and with RI being all but obsolete it may be a way to improve them. I hope you take note of these discussions devs it may be worth making this a feature request once the discussion is done.

[sbond101]

One problem with using RI to represent awareness is that awarness is ussual regional. For example, In toronto almost everybody who flies regularly has herd of porter (an airline which flies out of island airport). Although I doubt many outside of toronto and those who regularly commute into toronto from elsewhere know about the company. If an airline like that opens a new route from there hub there it wont take long for there established client base to find out about the route (people tend to begin looking for tickets on the websites of airlines they know).

I think the Idea of CI as a singular entity should be scrapped altogether in favour of regional image and route image for the following reasons.
1) if an east coast (US) regional carrier opens a base on the west coast, they should have to spend marketing dollars in the region in order get demand for routes not directed toward the US
2) on a route like New York to London, most people comming from London to the US will buy a ticket with an airline known in the UK for BOTH legs (to and home) where someone begining in the US will likely bookboth legs with a airline well known in the US. In order to capture more then 50% market share on the route an airline needs to spend marketing dollars in both regions.
3) regional airlines which have flights on many short routes in a specific area (eg the northeast of north america) should have marketing costs based not on the number of destinations but on the number of distinct regions there destinations reside in. By the same token it should be extreamly expensive to market an airline which flies a small number of routes to a wide veriety of regions if market share from the oposit end of the route is to be captured.

regional image could be relatively easily implimented by dividing the world up into regions which share the same languge/media outlets and having marketing campeigns associated with the region. At the same time the concept of demand from each of the two regions on a route could be implimented by making two seperate calculations for pax based on demand that is ratioed by the size of the airport (ie 70% of demand on the london to dublin route would be in the London region (assuming there different regions) because Heathrow is a much larger airport drawing from a much more prosperous region.

[GEnx]

I just thought of something..

If a company aims to increase their public perception, doesn't this automatically raise public awareness as well? I think one can increase public awareness without raising public perception, but not the other way around.