Singapore Entrepreneurs

Recently, BL was invited by our partners High Browse Online from the National Library Board to conduct an interview with Peter Fisk, author of Marketing Genius. We share some interesting excerpts on why Asia does not have a top-100 brand and some thoughts from Peter on rebranding Singapore. We refer you to the full interview in the High Browse Online blog.

Two interesting questions which BL has posed to Peter Fisk, came from an earlier blog entry Top 100 World Brands and why I think they are there (written by Wannapreneur) and another about his advice in rebranding Singapore. We share the excerpts here with our readers:

HB:In the recent top 100 brands in Business Week, there is no brand arising from China, despite their vast market size. One reason given is the difference in culture between Asia and Western brands. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think that there is really a cultural divide?

Peter Fisk: I don’t think it will be long before Chinese brands start entering Business Week’s world’s leading brands. Companies like Lenovo and China Telecom are huge and influential players. They and others will be the Samsung and Toyota’s of the next few years.

However we should remember what BW’s league table is actually measuring – brand value is essentially measured by looking at what uplift the brand gives a companies future profit streams. This is typically less than 10%, and therefore brand value and position in the league table is mainly driven by the size of the company rather than the quality of the brand.

As Asian companies grow in value – as they are at a much more significant rate than many existing market leaders – then their brand values will grow even more quickly.

However Asian brands in my experience are typically different.

In general terms, Western brands are more emotional and work more deeply than those in Asia. Western brands are built over many years – and typically manifest through a strong heritage, product attributes and service style. By comparison, Asian brands are more rational, and therefore less engaging. They are more superficial, built to drive short-term sales. Marketing is more subservient to sales, focused on driving revenues rather than long-term value.

Asian brands have a great opportunity to engage customers more deeply, and the brands that manage to do this first – to tap into the appropriate values and aspirations of target customers – will be incredibly successful.

HB: As Singapore is currently undergoing a rebranding exercise, what lessons from your book that will be useful for us to come up with new ideas of rebranding?
Peter Fisk: How to brand Singapore – start with the audience – is it more for the people who live here, or the people who we want to come here. In reality it is both, but they obviously connect. The clues lie in why people want to come here

1. What are their aspirations for work or life in coming to Singapore?
2. How can Singapore help them uniquely or better to achieve this?
3. What is a distinctive and engaging way of expressing this?

In the book we combine a range of techniques to achieve this – using customer energiser to find what really inspires people, brand magnetics to align the motivations of each audience, and brand signature to structure it, and customer scripting to articulate it.

My feeling is that Singapore has a fantastic proposition to make, but has yet to express it in a compelling and distinctive way. Its more than an identity and strapline – like Miro’s Spain and Pure New Zealand – it captures the nation’s spirit and future.

You can find the full interview with Peter Fisk in the High Browse Online blog, under the National Library Board. BL thank Lim Lee Ping from NLB for facilitation of the interview.

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