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'Bridging the Branding Divide'
By : M. Hafidz Mahpar
Date : 28 February 2004
THE majority of Malaysian companies polled by brand
consultancy Trax Associates admitted they were not investing enough in brand building.
Surprisingly, a whopping 86 per cent of the chief executive officers (CEOs) claimed to
believe in the economic value of branding.
Why this discrepancy between belief and actual practice?
According to Trax Associates Sdn Bhd CEO Yasmin Merican,
it is because brand building as a strategic business driver is not yet on the top of CEOs'
minds within most emerging market companies.
"This is a discipline which the globally-branded
companies have been practising for decades. To strengthen this linkage, you need to start
building an enterprise-wide brand infrastructure," she tells BizWeek.
While local firms do invest in advertising and promotion,
Yasmin thinks this is not enough.
| "Branding is often
perceived as advertising or communications, so there is this thinking that if you invest
in communications, you can write it off every year. But if you are making a strategic
investment, branding investment decisions have to be made upfront together with business
strategy," she says. "You have to
factor branding into your mindset - into your whole strategic planning, into how you
invest in your people, products, services and technologies."
Yasmin says that the CEO has to be the chief
brand-builder; otherwise, there will not be enough money and drive behind the brand.
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| "Malaysian companies need to build
their brand infrastructure as soon as possible" |
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The only good news from Trax's survey findings, she
says, is that CEOs do see the economic potential of brand building. "After that, in
response to the other questions, we got feedback like they're not investing enough,
they don't have the competencies, and the global companies are branding differently
from the way Malaysian companies are."
A total of 145 CEOs responded to the survey that led to the Malaysian Brand Practice
Report 2003, which was launched this month by International Trade and Industry
Minister Datuk Seri Rafidah Aziz. The survey was supported by the Malaysian Institute of
Management and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Source: Malaysian Brand
Practice Report 2003 |
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Yasmin divides corporate brand
orientations into three phases. To illustrate these phases, she shows this writer a
diagram on her laptop. Phase 3 is the
"superbranders" (global brands), symbolised by concentric circles with the
innermost circle representing the brand DNA and the seven layers around it being the
infrastructure built to support it (competencies, products, services, technologies,
business processes, partners, etc).
Phase 2 is represented with a larger inner circle but one
that has only three outer layers. She calls those in this phase the "brand
aspirants."
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As for the first phase ("non-branded"), the
brand DNA circle has broken and disconnected layers. "This is where a lot of the
Malaysian companies find themselves. When branding occurs at the functional level -
the advertising or communication or marketing level - you do not actually have the
layers. Every year your investments and the brand value flake off because you don't
have the infrastructure to drive the brand," she says.
Yasmin, who was account director of multinational ad
agency Bates Malaysia in the late `80s, says that when multinationals expand around
the world, they bring with them their advertising agencies. "Malaysian companies may
have just looked at that model and saw only the tip of the iceberg. Basically we only saw
the cosmetics.
We did not see what's below that - that they have the infrastructure behind
their brands such as the investment models, the technologies, the competencies, and the
strategic commitments." She says many Malaysian companies have yet to
create a brand blueprint like the multinationals do, i.e. a strategic business blueprint
as opposed to a marketing communications one. "Without it, you're wandering in
the dark in branding," she adds.
Most of the CEOs polled by Trax were either dissatisfied
or unsure of the level of brand competencies within their organisations. Asked whether
they had sufficient competencies in-house to build brands confidently, 40 per cent said no
and 27 per cent replied they were not sure. Eight out of 10 respondents said their
organisations did not have a brand department or unit.
Yasmin says: "Like all surveys go, you only get the
current reading - a picture of where brand building practices are in Malaysia.
What's more important is what's the solution."
She founded Trax Associates in 2000 after leaving Ernst
& Young, where she was an international partner. "I wanted to develop a brand
building solution for emerging market companies. It was very ambitious at that time, but
four years later it is gratifying to see that perhaps we're right about this,"
she says.
Yasmin, who has an MBA (distinction) in strategic
marketing, says Trax has designed its solution so that the branding process runs parallel
to business strategy.
It has spent four years developing its brand delivery
system called market think. She believes Trax is the first Malaysian company to
develop an enterprise-wide brand building solution.
Yasmin defines branding as "form, character and
delivery."
"Form is everything that you see, character is
everything that you feel, and delivery is everything you experience in a brand. What you
can see, you can outsource; you can buy design, for example. Character is how the
organisation wants to be perceived by the external and internal stakeholders, and
character can also be created through advertising. But it is in delivery of the service or
product that no one can do but you (the company)," she says.
The delivery part requires technologies, staff training,
and retail presence, among others.
"Trax is perhaps the only consulting firm in the
country that builds the brand from strategic alignment right through to performance
measurement, and ours is a 16-step process. And we're the only one that builds brand
infrastructures," says Yasmin.
She feels Trax's method helps accelerate the
development of the competencies. The process could be completed within six to 12 months.
Among Trax's previous clients were Sepang
International Circuit, the MRCB group and Petronas Dagangan (where it prototyped the
end-to-end solution).
On whether Trax has a disadvantage being a local company,
Yasmin says: "There's a principle in branding called the country-of-origin
effect. Everything that is created at home is seen as being not as good as the imported
version.
"When I started this company, I knew that going into
the field of consulting - although I've put in a lot of years - the driver
of this business is credibility. I thought that personal credential was enough, but
it's not. You still have to demonstrate that you can do this as good, if not better,
than the internationals."
Confident of the solutions that Trax provides, she says:
"I think we have been able to demonstrate that we may not have an international
equivalent."
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