Insight
Why hide the "Invisible Champion of Taiwan" if it is the champion?
(Written by Ren Li-Chung / Professor of Marketing and Director of Global Branding and Marketing Research Center, Department of International Business, National Taiwan University)
The 27th Taiwan Excellence Award is in full swing this year. This award, which represents the highest honor for Taiwanese products, attracts more than 1,000 entries each year. Behind these entries lie the hard work and pursuit of excellence of many Taiwanese manufacturers. But why are these products of such high quality, with such outstanding designs and
You have a lot of R&D patents, but your price is only one-third of your competitors', and your market share is still less than half of your competitors'? Why is good quality and low price not a guarantee of success in the market?
Other similar slogans also hide extremely contradictory concepts, such as "Invisible Champion", since it is a champion, why should it be hidden? To put it bluntly, it ignores "brand value".
Taiwan's industry, which is dominated by OEMs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), is particularly fond of emphasizing the "price-performance ratio" (commonly known as CP value, i.e., the ratio of performance to price), and the starting point of its business mindset is still mostly to emphasize the cost advantage. The so-called cost advantage often comes at the expense of profits. When the cost advantage is no longer there, the well-built enterprises start to look for overseas resources (land, labor) to keep their costs down, and the nomadic Taiwanese businessmen are born. However, there are some unhealthy companies with weak moral values that shift some of the costs that should be reflected in their own production costs to social costs (e.g., wastewater, air pollution, low-quality raw materials, etc.) in order to maintain their meager profit margins.
The significance of the micro-profit era not only represents the failure of manufacturers to create prices for brand marketing, but also hides the huge social costs borne by the country and society.
Apart from that, Taiwan's consumer products and large enterprises seem to be stuck in a small circle of promotions and advertisements in their understanding of brand marketing. A while ago, Chunghwa Telecom's 499 All-you-can-eat service created a sensation, and the sight of long lines seems to be commonplace in Taiwan. After world badminton queen Tai Chi Ying won the gold medal at the Asian Games in Jakarta, McDonald's, the company she endorses, launched a buy-one-get-one-free promotion for Big Mac, which again caused consumers to queue up like crazy. However, is it true that every time a manufacturer breaks its bones with a discount, it is guaranteed to be a success? In Taiwan, the streets are full of promotional activities, but the door is always empty. And as the annual sales of department stores account for an increasing proportion of their annual sales, smart consumers often choose to buy what they want only during the anniversary sale. In fact, manufacturers have overlooked the role of brand value in promotional activities. The higher the brand value, the more effective the promotion will be.
What is brand value? The answer to this question from the producer's point of view must be to talk about features, performance, cost, etc. This is limited. This is limited.
The true value of a brand is defined by the consumer.
What is the price difference between computers with and without Intel inside? Intel's sales rose 63% in the year following the adoption of "Intel inside", and its market capitalization rose from US$10 billion in 1991 to US$260 billion in 2001. Volume growth is a slow, straight-line climb, but value growth is a fast, curved leap. When consumers are willing to pay a different price for two chips with comparable features, performance, and cost, brand price differentials emerge. Not only cold chips can be branded; even in the funeral service industry, which everyone is afraid to talk about or avoid talking about, brand value can also be created, because what consumers want is not only the elegance of the chapel arrangement and the solemnity of the ceremony, but also a kind of interpersonal warmth and trust. If Longyan can capture this trust, the brand value of Longyan will exist.
How to capture the consumer's interest, hit the competitor's pain points, and show the brand's highlights, all of these require a full range of brand marketing talents to achieve their success.
Why is there such a shortage of branding and marketing talents needed to upgrade Taiwan's industrial operations? The United States accounts for more than 60% of the world's top 100 brands. This result can be attributed to the fact that in the U.S. higher education system, almost all of the top 100 universities have marketing departments, which are able to cultivate excellent marketing talents for various U.S. industries in a systematic and large-scale manner. Mainland China's higher education, which is catching up, has already set up marketing departments in two-thirds of the universities listed in the 985 Project. On the other hand, Taiwan's higher education resources have long been light on business, with less than 10 of the top 55 universities having marketing departments. Worse still, almost all of the top universities (National Chengchi University, National Chengchi University, National Sun Yat-sen University, National Central University, Taipei University, etc.) have no marketing departments. When Taiwan's higher education system is unable to absorb enough excellent marketing teachers to cultivate a full range of brand marketing talents for the industry to develop their brands, Taiwan's industry will find it difficult to develop a second line of growth.
In the long run, we must invest a lot of resources in the tertiary education system to enhance the attraction and cultivation of brand marketing talents in research and teaching. In the short term, we should set up a convention and exhibition platform for brand marketing in the industrial sector as soon as possible, so as to integrate the supply and demand sides of brand marketing in a more systematic and speedy manner. This convention and exhibition platform gathers relevant vendors that assist enterprises in brand positioning, shaping, promotion, maintenance and development support, and provides all enterprises that want to develop their brands with a one-time, one-step brand development solution.