Promotion

Promotion, driven by your promo budget, creates product awareness before customers shop. If customers are not aware of the product, they are less likely to buy, and that drags down the Survey score.

Think of it this way. Suppose you had a perfect product – a perfect design at a rock bottom price. Further, customers have no trouble finding your product when they shop, meaning that its accessibility is 100%. In this perfect world, you do no promotion at all. awareness is zero. What would happen to demand? On the one hand, some customers will stumble across your product when they shop, take the time to discover that it is perfect, and decide to buy it. On the other hand, some customers will pass over your product on their way to products they know about.

The simulation deals with the problem as follows. The customers that know about your product always consider it. Of the customers that are not aware of your product, half discover it, and half miss it. Mathematically it looks like this. Your perfect product (with perfect awareness) would start with a Survey score of 100. If its awareness were 60%, then 40% of your customers would not know about it. Of these, half (20%) would stumble across it. Instead of having the Survey score fall all the way to 60, it would fall halfway between 100 and 60, ending at 80.

Once you see that the score falls "halfway", it is relatively easy to estimate the result. For example:

To be precise, multiply the score you think your product deserves based upon its mix of price and product design by (1- (100%-awareness)/2). In the examples above:

100 * (1 – (100% – 0%)/2) = 100 * (1 – (50%)) = 100 * 50% = 50

60 * (1 – (100% – 70%)/2) = 60 * (1 – (15%)) = 60 * 85% = 51

20 * (1 – (100% – 40%)/2) = 20 * (1 – (30%)) = 20 * 70% = 14