I thought I should start a thread to discuss the #1 feature everyone wants to go in next (and this is a big one so it will take a few weeks) and that is marketing. These are my initial thoughts, and I value your input to make them better:
Marketing will have a process tech thats unlocked under ‘administration’. This merely let you build a marketing facility(or more than one). These work very similarly to research points, in that they generate marketing ideas on a constant basis. (Maybe ideas is a bad term…we need something…)
A new screen lets you see how many marketing ideas you have, and spend them (along with actual money) to run marketing campaigns.
There are different types of marketing campaign, such as online, social media, TV, billboards, magazines etc. They have to be unlocked as research in the normal R&D screen.
Each campaign has a target demographic, which will be one of the sales categories of Budget, Mid-range, Expensive or Luxury.
There are two types of campaign in each demographic:
Awareness Campaigns
These make more people aware of your company and your range. They will increase the number of customers each hour that visit your showrooms, desiring a look at the specific sales-category of car you are promoting. You will do this when you start bumping up against the natural capacity of customers in that price range.
Branding Campaigns
These increase the perceived value of your cars. They effectively add a certain amount to the value of each car which you can see as a brand bonus on cars in that price range. The effect wears off steadily after the campaign ends.
As competition from your rivals goes up, the price of all the ad campaigns will also rise. There will be some fuzzy-randomness around the effectiveness of each campaign.
Thoughts? Remember it needs to be kept reasonable in scope, as its only one part of a bigger game. We don’t have quality and recalls and mid-line QA in there yet 