When it comes to branding, many small and medium-sized enterprises often struggle with the question: "How to build a brand with little money?". The answer: "Do guerrilla marketing" is unanimously broadcast from many seminars on brand building experience.
With more than a decade of experience in marketing, Mr. Doan Si Hien, Chairman of the Board of Directors of IAM VN Company, has a different opinion. Choosing the “guerrilla marketing” method, you will fall into a situation of prolonged costs, little by little, but constantly. This situation will lead you to exhaustion.
And then you realize that the market order will never change unless you make the war formal. So the question we should ask is: “How to conduct a “formal war” to challenge the leading brands in the market with a limited budget?”.
The answer is to build your brand in stages.
Define a clear direction
Think carefully before you decide whether to go head-to-head with a big brand. If you don’t feel you have the “inner strength” then you should choose another direction.
Look at how the X-men shampoo brand does it. X-men doesn’t need to compete head-on with dozens of popular shampoo brands for everyone. X-men is just a shampoo for men.
Determine the time to go
Once you have determined the direction, and if you don't make any mistakes in your marketing plan, plus a little luck, you will keep a piece of the market for yourself. Be careful!
It is at the moment when you are intoxicated with success after having devoted all your efforts to promotional strategies with the ambition of shortening the gap with your competitors that your competitors will wake up and push you into a more fierce competition. Therefore, the "speed war" strategy needs to be considered, determining a sufficient period of time to implement the company's development plan.
Scope of implementation
Should we go nationwide or start with a few key cities? All-out or an “oil spill” strategy?
In my opinion, choosing to deploy in small areas and expanding to large areas will help you save a lot of costs for brand building communication, as well as costs for maintaining a sales distribution organization. Implement a marketing strategy in a specific area, stick to that area, then expand to a new area.
Understanding consumers
Conduct market research to understand consumers deeply, to design products that are relevant to them, and to differentiate them from competitors. Only products (not necessarily better) that are differentiated will have consumers – because of this differentiation, consumers are likely to try our products.
Strong distribution system
Our ancestors have a saying: “Diligence makes up for intelligence”. If you have little money for advertising, you must focus on selling. You must train your sales staff thoroughly and professionally so that in addition to their sales talent, they also understand the product’s features and quality so that they can go to each store and “sing” it well. This not only makes the store owners fall in love with the product but also trains the store owners themselves to know how to speak well of the product to the next customers.
If we don't have much money to advertise on television, we must know how to turn hundreds of sales staff into hundreds of television stations broadcasting live to thousands of stores every day and turn the stores into televisions for our business.
Eye-catching and perfect packaging
Vietnamese businesses often do not invest much in product packaging. A beautiful, luxurious packaging, when placed on the shelf, will look more eye-catching than the packaging of competitors. Therefore, do not save tens of millions of dong on this stage and lose billions in the future.
Perfect product quality
Every marketing program fails on the basis of a bad product! If you have a quality product, you will have the peace of mind to focus on building your brand. Otherwise, this problem will harass you with countless complaints from consumers, distributors returning products, and internal discouragement (due to lack of confidence in the quality)…
Courage and perseverance
Now that you have a good message, a strong distribution system, and a product of perfect quality, you can be confident that you have enough competitive advantage to persevere on the path you have chosen.
Sometimes you will encounter some difficulties in the beginning, but you will soon overcome them because of your brand. It is like a child who is well taken care of has strong resistance, the child will walk with all courage, and with time, the child will grow up without knowing it.
According to Saigon Economic Times
