Singapore Entrepreneurs

How do you let others know what your business is doing?

For those who are involved in a business venture or social enterprise, you need to make people aware of what you are providing. Let’s use ourselves as an example, Singapore Entrepreneurs blog focussed on entrepreneurial education in Singapore and aims to share the perspectives, experience and ideas from Singaporean entrepreneurs based here or overseas with our readers. If we are going to tell you that we should just wait for people who are interested in entrepreneurship to come and visit this blog, we are deluding myself and our service will never sell. That’s why it is important to be able to find ways to inform others what we are doing and establish links with people who share similar mindsets with us.

The tool that you need is called marketing, which is defined by Chartered Institute of Marketing to be the management process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer requirements profitably. In this article, we want to specialize the issue towards branding. A brand is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a company, product or service. Establishing the definition of a brand, one can now define branding to be the process by which a company, product or image becomes synonymous with a set of values, aspirations or states.

To simplify the issue for you, let me use the following picture and ask you how many of these logos you know:

Why branding?

Sometime, after completing a project with MIT-$50K, someone asked me, “What have you learned from your experience working with them?” I smiled and replied, “There are five things I learned from MIT-$50K, one, entrepreneurship, two, three, four and five, branding, branding, branding and branding.” That reply subsequently became my mantra towards building the other entrepreneurship societies which I worked with. You must be wondering why I place some much emphasis in branding. I can think of the following reasons to address to the question, “Why branding?”:

1. You don’t buy something, you purchase an identity: Whenever, you purchase a brand, say, a Zara dress, a Mac notebook, a mug of Starbucks coffee, you did not realize that you have subconsciously identified yourself with a particular culture. Let’s use another brand, French Connection UK, otherwise known as F.C.U.K. The brand made use of the displacement of the letters C and U to subdue you towards thinking of a obscene word. The association with a obscene word is not to make you think vulgar. On the contrary, the idea is to subject you to thinking rebelliously against social norms. The yearn to break free from the usual social norms created an identity. By appealing to your individual identity, you purchase something with additional value that emerge with the brand.

2. You link the value of a product with a brand: The easy way to see this reason, is to ask the following question to yourself, “What is the difference between buying a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a Giordano polo shirt?” First, you question the reason behind why you buy the shirt. The answer will be that you need something to wear. Once you cast aside the reason that both shirts have actually solved your purpose of the need to wear a shirt, you realize that you see something different. You start to distinguish between both products. You justify that the Ralph Lauren shirt is comfortable to wear and the shirt is made from good worksmanship and material. In retrospect, you have set up a pricing system to valuate both T-shirts. The reason is that a brand has artificially enhanced the value of the product.

3. You associate brands with popular culture and social norms: If you have been to a Borders bookstore in the UK, you will notice that in every single one of them, there is a Starbucks cafe inside the bookstore. The phenomenon came from the US, where a book lover will like to sit down in a cafe to read a book. Suppose you define this as a form of popular culture, you soon realize that sitting in a cafe reading a book with a mug of Starbucks coffee is a social norm. These norms invisibly creeps into our minds and creates the association of the brands with the daily routines. For the younger generation, we associate drinking coffee in an air-conditioned cafe like Starbucks to be hippier than in a food court .

[To be continued in Part II]

References:

1. Robert B. Cialdini “Influence: Science and Practice”
2. Mark Tungate “Fashion Brands: Branding Style from Armani to Zara”
3. Helen Vaid “Branding: brand strategy, design and implementation of corporate and product identity”
4. Wikipedia Entry on Marketing and Branding
5. “Much Ado about Branding”, talk presented by BL, National University of Singapore Entrepreneurship Centre.

Author’s Note: This series “Much Ado about Branding” is based on a talk I have delivered in NUS to students from Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship, Singapore Entrepreneurs, Branding, Marketing, Brands

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