Hello, 👋

Welcome to another update on our progress. I certainly hope you had a swell week. 😃 Today we will take a detailed look at how marketing works.

The role of marketing

Marketing helps increase your food stand business’s awareness in a specific locality or city. Because your food stand will have competition, marketing is the only way to protect and grow 📈 your brand while diminishing 📉 that of the competition.

Design

There are five types of marketing available: Pamphlet 📜 and Social Media 📱 marketing affect a Stand’s brand strength in a locality, while Online 🌐, Radio 📻, and TV 📺 marketing affect the company’s brand strength across the city 🏙️.

Each marketing type has a minimum, average, and maximum investment size, cost, and impact. The sizes help to budget and control your marketing investment.

Pamphlet marketing 📜 is the lowest form of marketing. To balance reality and fun for players, we linked its price to a real-life cost element and exponentially increased ⬆️ the impact of marketing in-game. We used each country’s average burger bike cost as the real-life cost element.

Depending on your chosen country, this results in a higher or lower pamphlet marketing cost.

Below, you can see the difference in cost for pamphlet marketing in Australia ($900), the United States ($575), and Canada ($800), respectively.

Tying the pamphlet marketing cost to a real-life cost element also allowed us to use it as the basis for costing the other forms of marketing.

Impact on your Business

The type and size of marketing activity you invest in impacts your Brand Strength. Your brand strength shows your company’s popularity in a locality or city. It forms part of your Stand’s Range of Influence.

A Stand’s range of influence allows it to attract 🧲 more customers farther away from the Stand. We talked more about it in this episode.

Every company 🏢 starts with Zero brand strength. Over time, brand strength can increase to 150 points or decrease to -10 points, depending on marketing investments made and news events that affect the company’s brand. Each type and size of marketing activity increases the Stand’s brand strength by a fixed amount.

The Stand’s brand strength in a locality at any given time is the sum of the impact of its marketing activities and any negative or positive events affecting the brand.

The brand, in turn, forms part of the Stand’s range of influence based on this formula:

As the Stand’s brand value grows 📈, its range of influence will widen, allowing it to attract more customers.

Impact on the Competition

The presence of competition introduces a new element to the brand formula. Recall that marketing is the only way to protect your brand and diminish that of the competition.

Here is how it works.

When you invest in marketing, the competition’s brand suffers an equal deduction ⏬ in brand strength. The impact depends on the type and size of your investment and the competition’s ongoing marketing activity (If any).

If there is more than one competitor, the deduction is equally distributed across all of them.

The same is true when the competition invests in marketing. Your brand strength suffers a reduction based on the type and size of the marketing investment. The brand formula with competition becomes:

Here’s a sample marketing impact distribution and resulting brand strength among competitors in a locality. Event impact is not included in this table because, although they affect brand strength, they are random.

In the table, Player 1 invests in pamphlets 📜, social media 📱, and online 🌐 marketing. Player 2 invests in TV 📺 marketing, Player 3 in Online 🌐 marketing, and Player 4 in Radio 📻 marketing.

Although Player 1 is investing in 3 smaller forms of marketing, the impact from the competition’s marketing is driving down it’s brand strength.

Likewise for Players 3 and 4. Their marketing investment is not enough to withstand the competition’s marketing activities.

Player 2’s heavy investment in TV marketing is sufficiently maintaining its brand strength despite the activities of the others.

You can see that consistent marketing is critical to being successful in multiplayer. Experimenting with different combinations of marketing types and sizes can also provide a unique advantage against the competition.

By maintaining a solid investment in marketing, your food truck company will be able to attract new customers and outcompete other Stands in the city. Hopefully. 😉

That’s it for today, Cheers 🥂

Don’t forget to Wishlist the game if you haven’t: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1429080/Business_Heroes_Food_Truck_Simulation/

Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Kunal & the team