EVERY business wants to generate a successful brand. But not all brands get to shine like Apple, Nike, BMW, Singapore Airlines or Netflix.
While building a brand is a challenging task in itself in this competitive age, keeping the brand viable and vibrant requires a different set of skillsets.
With disruptions and competitors constantly demanding your attention, customers and employees pose distinct challenges as well.
In the WED WEB CHAT — Protect Your Brand, panellists discussed the issue from various perspectives.
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Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — Protect Your Brand at the foot of the article.
All About Governance
Samir Dixit, Global Head of Acorn Management Consulting, emphasised the importance of governance when it comes to protecting a brand.
Samir’s leanings are geared towards action.
He recalls an incident when a Thai Airways plane crashed and the reaction on the ground was to black out the brand markings so that news videos would not show which brand was involved in the crash.
He sees that as a brilliant case of protecting the brand.
Samir feels that while building equity has a small part to play in protecting a brand, it’s managing a brand’s reputational risk that concerns him more. How do brands mitigate those negative elements, to remain protected?
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Samir says most brands lack a brand governance process within the organisation to deal with reputational risk, financial risk, strategic risk and operational risk.
While many brands optimistically build up their profile in the public space — corporate colours, logos, products — they fail to consider the negative aspects that could befall an organisation and are often ill prepared for any potential consequences.
Brand As A Feeling
For Claudia Wieshuber, Director of Marketing at BMW ASIA, the focus was on building brands and building strong relationships with customers and partners through brand relevance.
She reflects on how BMW, a brand that prides itself on performance cars, pulled out of Formula One to focus on the shifting trend towards sustainability. While that could have impacted the brand’s reputation and standing, global events have moved in its favour, allowing for its continued acceptance as a leading luxury and premium global brand.
The importance of brand to the customer was also made apparent when Jaguar decided to go through a logo rebranding exercise in late 2024.
There was a lot of global reaction to Jaguar’s bold move, which only highlighted to Claudia, the significance of a brand to various generations.
The 3 Ds of Country Branding
Rick Koh Buck Song, author of Brand Singapore is a country brand adviser. He reckons there’s no way to protect a country’s brand. By being picky about negative reports, it potentially opens it up to further reporting on the subject, possibly going viral, aka the Streisand Effect.
Rick says country brands are built by three activities — branding by Design, branding by Default and branding by Diffusion.
He explains the differences using examples like Singapore Airlines and Raffles Hotel.
Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — Protect Your Brand below.
Watch our previous wedwebchats: https://storm-asia.com/category/wed-web-chat/
If you have a topic that is of interest, or have someone who would make a good panellist with a thought-provoking perspective on a subject, please email editor@storm-asia.com with your details and a short summary.
