Brand Loyalty

Under the market clearing system, buyers fill their orders cheapest-first, so if a rival undercuts you, they can take your customers outright. Brand loyalty is the counterweight: a reputation your corporation earns that keeps a share of your customers buying from you, at your price, even when someone cheaper exists.

It is not a mode you switch on, and it is not tied to marketing strength, takeovers, or any player-versus-player stat. Every corporation has loyalty, and it is earned or lost purely through how you price and deliver.

What loyalty does#

When you have loyalty, a slice of each market's demand is set aside for loyal customers before the cheapest-first scramble. Those customers buy from you at your posted price. The rest of the market clears as normal.

The slice is relative and finite. Each market has one pool of "loyal-type" customers, and corporations split it in proportion to their loyalty relative to each other. Two consequences follow:

• If everyone maxes out their loyalty, everyone's share is equal, which is the same as no one having an advantage. Loyalty only pays off when you have more of it than your rivals.
• You cannot buy that edge. It comes from your rivals slipping: gouging their customers, failing to deliver, or losing their factories.

This works for any pricing strategy. A consistent discounter builds "value brand" loyalty (your regulars don't chase a rival who dips even lower); a consistent premium seller builds "prestige" loyalty (your customers pay more and stay). Aldi loyalty is as real as Apple loyalty.

How you earn it#

Loyalty rises when, in the same turn, all of the following are true:

• You price consistently: your posted price stays close to your own established norm (a slow-moving average of how you've priced recently), not the market's.
• You deliver: you actually sell most of what you offer (a healthy fill rate).
• You're contested: at least one rival is posting a meaningfully cheaper price and you're holding your customers anyway. Loyalty earned in a monopoly means nothing, so it doesn't accrue there.

How you lose it#

• Gouging: a sudden, sharp price hike above your own norm. Your customers learned to expect one thing and you betrayed it; this is the biggest single hit, wiping out many turns of earned trust at once.
• Erratic pricing: drifting away from your own norm turn to turn. (Cutting prices is penalized only lightly, since a sale reads differently than a betrayal.)
• Failing to deliver: not selling enough of your book.
• Losing a facility: when a sector leaves your corporation (sold, taken over, closed, or nationalized), your brand takes a hit proportional to how big that sector was for you. Losing your flagship plant costs far more reputation than shedding a tiny outpost.
• Sitting idle: loyalty slowly drifts down on turns where you neither earned nor were penalized. It is use-it-or-lose-it; you cannot bank it and coast.

What you see#

You never see the raw loyalty number. Instead your brand shows as one of five tiers:

Unknown → Emerging → Respected → Trusted → Iconic

Only you (as the corporation's owner) can see the finer detail behind your own brand. Rivals see only your tier.

Strategy notes#

• Consistency beats cleverness. Picking a lane (reliably cheap or reliably premium) and holding it earns loyalty. Jumping around forfeits it.
• Don't gouge a shortage. When prices rise across a scarce commodity, riding them up above your norm is tempting, but it triggers the gouging penalty. Holding your price can earn loyalty from the customers your gouging rivals are driving away.
• Loyalty is a shield, not a wall. A strong brand protects a slice of your customers from undercutting, but never all of them: being loyal makes you hard to knife, not unkillable. Undercutters still win the price-shopping majority of every market.

Related#

• Commodities: supply, demand, and clearing
• Market System: A Player's Guide: how posted-price clearing works
• Corporations: sectors, pricing, and market capture