Corporate Branding sudden loyalty drop? How does it work?

[kazenorin]

In my latest game, my corporation recently switched to corporate branding since I believe that all new products I introduce to the market would be at least 80 or higher.

This was my first time in many years (in real life) I tried using Corporate Branding. Actually I never really used it since CapLab because I can't understand the way it functions and almost always end up in very low brand loyalty.

Now for this game, something like this happened:

01.png (20.11 KiB) Viewed 1450 times

The brand loyalty for Shenyang dropped from around 10 to 20 to -41 and still dropping.

This happened when I started producing Cars of 91 quality, but I suspect that it's a coincidence since I haven't even started selling them when it began to drop. It seemed to drop even faster once I introduced the cars.

I've checked the products I'm producing, the lowest quality is a 85-quality Toy Doll and a 86-quality Grape Juice. All products I am producing and selling are of higher quality than all other competitors (mostly only local competitors)

But the same products, all distributed from the same warehouses, are also sold in the 99-Brand Loyalty Buenos Aires. This completely confuses me.

Shenyang is my starter city, so I do have a couple of supermarkets which were selling products that are not produced by me. A few of these products happen to have very low/low quality (24-quality ice cream, and 64-quality toilet cleaner), and a few not-too-low (78-quality toilet cleaner and 85-quality chewing gum).

I suspect that this is why Shenyang have very low brand loyalty, but that doesn't explain why Buenos Aires have very high brand loyalty.
I also thought that only products I produce (or with my label) affect corporate brand loyalty.

Any thoughts and advice on this?

ps. I've activated only the Subsidiaries DLC.

Edit: Got rid of the low quality products I was selling, brand loyalty did not improve. Not even after a year of game time (it stabilized at around the state of the above screenshot)

[Arcnor]

I could be completely wrong on this, but I think it has to do with the types of products you are selling. This is my theory:

Corporate branding works when you sell products that complement each other. In the game are Mega Product classes that when sold together complement each other from a branding perspective.

If you are selling the Toy Doll, Grape Juice, and Cars all with the same branding then I think you take a loyalty hit for that since they are in such different product classes.

Though that wouldn't explain why your loyalty would be negative in Shenyang and then 99 in Buenos Aires.

I am very interested in hearing the answer to this as I usually always have trouble with brand loyalty myself.

[ebolamonkey]

I've been trying Range and now Unique branding to see if it makes the situation better. Quality issues makes Range branding difficult if outliers exist in an otherwise homogeneous supergroup.

Unique branding would seem to fix that at the expense of additional advertising dollars although unique branding gets to 100 2x as fast as Range. The aforementioned quality issues, however, can have systematic downsides that would hinder the benefits.

I think Corporate Branding would be a nightmare and impossible to rank in the top 3 for Challenge Games due to the complexity of mastering all 81 products under one umbrella brand.