SGE-E27 Event: “A Brand Paints A Thousand Words” in RJC

Beginning our first leg in RJC with a talk on branding, entitled A Brand Paints a Thousand Words, we share with you our thoughts on the presentation of the talk and event from the presenter’s point of view. The talk was held in Raffles Junior College yesterday (11 July 2006). This SG Entrepreneurs (SGE)-E27 jointly organized lecture circuit is the first of our social outreach to junior colleges and polytechnics in Singapore.

Sometime back in our first pub crawl, Bjorn and Justin popped up the idea of a lecture circuit jointly organized by SG Entrepreneurs and E27. We began to engage the junior colleges and polytechnics in Singapore, and came down to about five. If possible, we hope to open up these lectures for the public when we move onto the next few schools. For us, this is a non-profit social enterprise to promote entrepreneurial education to students and also market SG Entrepreneurs to engage the youth to join some of our new and about to be jumpstarted projects. We began with Raffles Junior College since their Entre-Week is happening this week.

As the presenter, it is a challenge on a few fronts. The first is the selection of the topic and the second is how to use the presentation to promote constant interaction with the students and teachers. Since I was asked to pick between branding and networking, I took the option of doing a branding talk. After all, I have done a similar talk with Peking University and it would be easier to accumulate the content for the talk. I have never done a talk with keynote slides that contains only pictures but no words. To improve my presentation capability, I decided to try the techniques I learned from Presentation Zen on my audience. The first we did when we are inside the seminar room, I asked the students to re-arrange the chairs in a semi circle, so that it resembled the amphi-theatre setting in most business schools. Besides, it will also be good to see everyone all at one go.

I took the Socratic approach to ask a series of questions to the audience and prompted them towards the understanding in how companies develop and market their brands. I used a total of 20 slides, excluding the first and last slide, and dedicated about 40 minutes for me to talk and let the audience to interact more with me in the process.

Here are some interesting trivia for the talk:

• Using the RJC as an example of a brand: I was thinking of the logos to put on the title slide. In the end, I picked the RJC logo. There are two reasons. The first, is that I want to thank them for inviting me to give the talk, and second, it relates to their branding in the best schools in Ox-bridge and the Ivy Leagues. I started with the story that I was on a high table formal hall dinner with the former Master in Trinity College, Cambridge. I told him that I was from Singapore and had just finished a PhD in physics, and the first thing he asked me, “Are you from Raffles Junior College?”
• Breaking the talk into two parts: the first part of the talk focussed more on getting to understand why people brand. We introduce examples to show how brand can help to price and build the credibility of the product. The second part of the talk discussed how companies use the six strategies of influence (namely reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity) to promote their brand to the market.
• Did you see Bjorn preparing to blog with the picture above? Kudos to Justin for this interesting picture.

Of course, it was an enjoyable session. I did hope that the audience had enjoyed this presentation. Of course, I will be happy to hear some feedback to improve myself better for the next presentation. We hope to open up this series of talks to the public and also provide a podcast or videocast so that you can watch it in here the next time.

About The Author

SGE - (SGE)

Covering the Singapore and Southeast Asia startup and entrepreneurship scene since 2005.

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