July 23, 2002
Brand building stories and lessons from Thailand
Brand Age's 'Brand Building & Communication Strategy' seminar in Bangkok Thailand last week revealed some interesting stories of building brands in Thailand's ultra-competitive cell-phone market. But even more significant was the different approaches of brand builders for each brand, reflecting the strong advertising-agency approach of marketing and branding in Thailand. Lets look firstly at some of the mini case study excerpts from the Nation report on Brand building in mobile companies, and look at their implications for successful branding in Thailand. (Extracts) TA Orange brands for Thailand as a new market entrant Rungfa Ratanachaikanont, TA Orange's head of marketing communications, said that the Orange brand name is powerful enough in itself to attract customers. She recalled that the hardest part of the marketing campaign was to localise Orange's global image without losing five key concepts, dynamism, friendliness, honesty, straightforwardness, and refreshing. The marketing team became extremely stressed trying to achieve this as "failure was not an option". "So we helped calm them down by having lovely kids give them boxes of chocolates. The cheering-up strategy worked and recharged their batteries, giving them renewed energy," she said. That was when the team came up with the touchy "get closer" concept for the company's first TV advertising campaign launched in April this year, which encouraged people to talk more with one another via TA Orange handsets. AIS - market leader mistakes and recoveries AIS, the market leader, had an unbelievably bad start to the launch of its pre-paid phone 1-2-Call when only one handset was sold. Songsak Premsuk, AIS executive vice president, said the company carried out a number of surveys to find out the best name. Most respondents suggested "quick call". But later Sanchai Tiewprasertkul, AIS's former marketing executive, decided to go with the name 1-2-Call. But on the trial launch in Chiang Mai in April 1999 only one handset was sold on the first day, Songsak laughed. "Later we used the slogan, 'using 1-2-Call is easier than counting 1, 2, 3' and had teen idols as our presenters. We failed again, by selling only 20,000 handsets by the end of 1999," he said. AIS then did some more homework and decided that its pre-paid phone system should not be aimed solely at youngsters but all age groups. Songsak said the firm's next step to hold on to its share of the pre-paid phone market would be a campaign entitled "stay with me" to foster brand loyalty. DTAC Rebrands Somvong Pongstaporn, marketing manager of United Communication Industry, the parent firm of DTAC, said that DTAC was forced to re-brand by the upcoming debut of TA Orange and the non-stop-growth of AIS. "We had to do something, starting with incorporating our more than 30 air-time tariffs and our plethora of logos," he said. At the time DTAC also launched its per-second billing, drop call compensation, and nationwide flat-rate charge, the first cell-phone operator in Thailand to do so. (End Extracts) The threat and the lessons for marketing and brand building in Thailand are well illustrated by the above extracts. In a city where the advertising industry has a leading reputation for creativity and successful campaigns region-wide, Thailand runs the risk of too much "success" in advertising and marketing. Advertising generally makes up a far too dominant proportion of the marketing mix, while there is less attention to branding. "Branding" is often defined to local companies by advertising agencies, and as expected far too much emphasis it given to logos, to the extent that even some of Thailand's leading advertisers think of branding as synonymous with "logos". We expect Orange, with their experience in building a strong global brand, to have a competitive advantage in branding in Thailand. As they are aware, logos are only a small and latter stage in successful branding, not the central or only element. Chao Phraya River Rat in Branding on July 23, 2002 10:42 AM |
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