Marketing question

[Eric.B]

Sorry for the late reply, busy day today.

Either I'm a complete useless bastard, or those marketing budgets in the stock reports of other companies don't exist.

You are correct, you are shown dealerships there and not marketing budget. I can work it in though.

You've mentioned that we don't have the right to see the marketing budget of a private company and yet as a player we have access to every single competitor's "cost per unit" stat for each car. Does this mean that the figures are just an approximation?

I assume you mean "Unit Costs" IE the material costs of the vehicles. While it is rare to the know the exact material costs in real life of your competition's good. There is a whole industry of being able to predict the build costs of goods. To figure out the material costs of any good, simply break down that good, components that are not produced by the company, you find out how much it is to buy those parts, parts that are produced by the company, you weigh the materials.

You are shown the Unit Costs of AI vehicles. But i'm pretty sure you're not shown the real costs, IE Total Cost Of Delivery Total Production Costs. Nor are you shown RnD Budgets, etc.

With the marketing efficiency report, is this really measuring efficiency, or is it simply stating the money I've allocated for each city and its marketing channel? What I mean is, if I go to a city and move the slider to half way, is the efficiency report simply stating this (eg: newspaper coverage is 50% which equals "poor" in the report). Or is there another calculation going on? Is there a time element as well? Would running a newspaper budget at 50℅ over a few years slowly raise my company's profile in that city? How about the option of allowing a company to pay for some marketing analysis from time to time?

The efficiency is timed base. So If you set the slider at 50% you will go from 0% to 50% over a period of time. The speed at which it goes up (and how high the max is) depends on your marketing skills and employee moral.

Your marketing skills go up based on the average of sliders you have. Over time.

There are no "profiles" for cities. As your marketing image in the city goes up, you will get a bonus to your consumer buyer rating which will make your vehicles more desirable to your competition.