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Why Are Singapore Brands Accident Prone?
Ask any Singapore company what their unique selling proposition is and more often than not you will get this answer: “We are as good as the premium brands but almost as cheap as the entry level brands. We give our customers the best of both worlds.” In other words, these brands are stuck in the middle. A dangerous place to be because they will be squeezed by premium brands from the top and by budget brands from the bottom. There is no such thing as the best of both worlds. Premium quality demands premium pricing.
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Do You Know What Branding Is? Do You, Really?
Before you can understand what branding is, you need to first know what a brand is. Again, there are many different definitions of what a brand is. The conventional definition of a brand is “a trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer”. However, a brand is not something that exists on paper or even in the real world. A brand exists only in the minds of people. People don’t care how academics or lawyers or branding experts define what a brand is. To them, a brand is simply an idea that exists in their mind. If you want to know what a particular brand is all about, all you have to do is find out what idea that brand owns in the minds of people.
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For The Next Big Brand, Look To The Little Guys
Big global brands are almost always launched by small entrepreneurs instead of big, powerful corporations in spite of the fact that big corporations have all the resources, people, credentials, distribution channels and marketing muscle to launch the next big brand. So, why can’t big corporations create the next big thing?
- The Size Of The Market Is Not Important
Are you creating a new market or serving an existing one? If you want to create an iconic brand, you don’t ask, “What is the size of the market?” That would be a big mistake and it is a mistake that many marketers have made in the past. It is also an easy trap to fall into because it is such a natural question to ask.
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Are You Competing With Your Customers Unknowingly?
This might seem like a strange question to ask and most CEOs will probably throw you out of their office if you ask such a question. Of course not. Who would be stupid enough to compete with their customers? But it is a valid question because many companies compete with their customers without even knowing it. Or companies sometimes think that they can get away with it.
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Turn Your Distribution Channel Into A Big Brand
Many Singapore companies are missing on a huge opportunity to build powerful, world class brands around their distribution channels. There is actually a way that they can turn their distribution expertise into successful brand-building exercises. Successful brands are usually built when entrepreneurs introduce new categories. Brands can also been built around a particular type of distribution channel. There are some powerful brands whose primary driving force is the distribution channel.
- Psst… You Can Get In Through The Back Door, You Know?
Almost everyone faces entrenched competition that is like a solid brick wall, especially if you are a new kid on the block. Yet, many try to take their entrenched competitors head on which is suicidal.
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Don’t Confuse Complexity With Sophistication
A lot of people confuse complexity with sophistication. They are not the same thing. People are afraid to keep things simple because they are under this impression that simplicity will be viewed as stupidity. But if you want to build strong brands, simplicity is the way to go.
- Cheap Thing No Good. Good Thing No Cheap.
Singapore’s obsession with wanting things cheap and good is actually undermining Singapore companies’ brand building efforts. The reason is very simple. If you have a good or premium product, you need to charge premium prices in order for your brand to have credibility. Hard as it is for some of you to believe, customers actually expect to pay premium prices for a premium product.
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Scaling Digital’s Peaks
Despite all the talk about its transformative potential and the growing share of eyeballs it commands, digital advertising remains a disproportionately small piece of most advertisers’ ad spend. What’s keeping advertisers from conducting larger portions of their campaigns online, and why aren’t agencies moving the process forward with greater velocity?
- Connecting Sales to the Customer: How to Create A Sustainable Sales Culture and Make Each Year Better than the Last
It’s all back to the basics – focus on the customer and your sales will be taken care of. Develop a consultative approach to the way you approach each sales opportunity. See yourself as the trusted advisor to your customer by understanding his world. Consultative Engagement © sets you apart from the rest of your contenders. You will be able to build trust and credibility fast from the onset of the first customer meeting by blending professionalism with a personal touch. When you build your credibility as one who truly understands the customer, you’ll find each year’s sales target challenging but achievable.
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Less is More – How Does it Work in Writing Business Email?
How much time do you spend reading and writing email everyday? Many working professionals are spending half of their working hours on managing email. To practice the ‘less is more’ concept in business email writing, we aim at drawing the most interest from the readers with the least ambiguities from the writer. To draw interest, we need to show interest in the readers. Crystallizing the content requires the writer to plan the piece’s structure and polish its language.
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How Sales & Marketing Drives Financial Performance
This article provides an insight on how sales & marketing (S&M) initiatives drive financial performance, directly or indirectly.
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Marketing Modeling
Are you benefiting from the use of information technology in marketing? Globalization requires organizations to respond to a more complex environment of greater consumer power and sophistication, increasing competition and technology innovation. The marketing department is not shielded from such complexity and has to respond to decisions on research, forecasting, production, personnel, sales, supply chain, organizational strategy and operations management besides marketing strategy and marketing mix.
- The 8 Supervisory/Management Skills
“Training” is frequently mis-characterized as something which goes on in a classroom, as some sort of cognitive development of supervisors. In fact, very little of the training we do should be cognitive, that is, involving knowledge acquisition.
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