According to the Jakarta Post , VP Jusuf Kalla has asked Indonesian SMEs to brand their products in order to make Indonesian users proud of using the products.
While I applaud the sentiment (the firm I work for generates a lot of its revenue from branding activities), I think that VP Kalla has his priorities back to front.
Edelman’s global and regional research shows clearly that corporate reputation is built on quality of a product, support for the product and the quality of the leadership. A product brand is based more than anything on the quality of the customer experience and the product’s ability to meet a specific want (not necessarily a need) in the target audience.
What the VP should have been saying to SMEs was:
- Get your quality control up to international standards
- Make sure your customer support functions are given plenty of budget support
- Keep your customers engaged in an ongoing dialog to ensure that you fully understand their wants and needs
- Make sure that every promotional rupiah that you spend comes back to you with interest
- Build a cadre of customers who are so delighted with you and your product that they will shout it from the rooftops
- Set your advertising budget after you have allocated sufficient resources to every other point of customer engagement
In short, don’t settle for anything less than international standards, even if your product is for a predominantly domestic market.
A modern brand is built on a strong narrative. That narrative can be based on social responsibility, innovation, service quality or anything that customers find is a good reason to pay a little extra. Crucially, though, it has to be real. Investing in over-priced promotional campaigns to sell products that will never match the claims made for them is effectively brand suicide.
