Marketing/Advertising

[Unknown98]

I'm beginning to work on this feature so I figured I'd ask what you guys would like to see.

I was thinking you could advertise either your entire airline, for an overall reputation boost. Or, you could advertise a particular route, which would increase demand on that route (both ways). 

Any specific requests as to how it should work or what each type of ad medium should do? I don't want to create a basic system, I want your choices of ad types to matter. Maybe television is good for some things, but print is better for others. Basically I want each type of medium to have a different type of effect? If that makes sense.

I was thinking at the initial start of the game to lower the reputation you start with... maybe even all the way to 0%. That would make initial marketing very effective for getting a head start and attracting more passengers. As you grow and gain reputation naturally you could reduce marketing as you build brand image.

[chaitanya]

One way to promote routes can be sales on specific routes. It would work something like this: Reduced ticket price &More passengers.

10% reduced price for 10% passenger boost.
There can be options like this for 20% , 30% , 40% etc.

[skifans]

While I agree with the principle that a lower price should lead to more passengers I don't think the number should be known in advance. (Assuming you have another capacity). 10% extra passengers with 5% less price is likely to be obviously worthwhile. Your idea for marketing sounds good unk. I wonder what people fell about starting at 0. Take a look at PowdAir who are a new airline looking to launch this December for flights from the UK to Switzerland. Googling their name (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=powdai...58&bih=930) shows a number of press articles and reports on various sites, maybe some sort of inital bost to cover this effect? Or could we even boost marketing generally when new routes and aircraft deliver positive press coverage?

[Unknown98]

I don't think starting at 0 would be a huge problem. If you look at some route examples the difference isn't drastic from starting at 35%:

LHR-CDG: 0%
Economy: 121
Economy plus: 17
Premium economy: 15
Business: 2
First: 1

LHR-CDG: 35%
Economy: 209
Economy plus: 30
Premium economy: 27
Business: 4
First: 1

Works out to 42% drop in potential pax for economy class. Even so, 121 pax is just about enough to fill up an A319 or small 737. Definitely enough to fill up a regional plane.

Having a sale is interesting... you can already lower ticket price and gain a boost in passengers. That's just basic economics. But maybe I could do something where you could combine lower ticket prices with advertising to get even a higher boost. Set a particular route "on sale" and then advertise it. Good idea.

Another thing I wanted to do perhaps is allow players to define the geographic area that their marketing appears in. Maybe particular cities or countries. If you're a new airline that only has 4 destinations, it wouldn't make sense to advertise nationwide. Just in those 4 cities. Or maybe just your home base. Larger cities would have higher costs but also larger reach.

A lot of other games allow you to define a budget and then work off of that. But in reality that's not necessarily how it works. I was thinking you could buy "blocks" (idk what to call them) of advertising. If you want a 30 sec TV advert it will cost X amount. If you want another one, it will double that cost. And so on. You can't buy 1.5 TV ads, you either have to buy 1 or 2. Same with all other forms of advertising, except maybe online ads.