Interview
PRORIL: After the brand has been built, more work has to be done.
PRORIL, the Taiwanese pump brand designed by Process, has won a number of international design awards including the Golden Dot in Taiwan, the iF in Germany and the K-design in Korea, and the Good Design Award in Japan, where PRORIL has won again, which is a great achievement. What we are more curious about is how PRORIL is doing now, two years after the brand was officially launched. Has branding really helped the company? Therefore, we went to Kaohsiung again to learn more about the factory.
PRORIL Brand Design Files
Title: PRORIL Brand Design
Category: B3-01 Commercial Media / Content / Branding / CI
Designer: Process Pro Brand
Manufacturer/Customer：Fang Sheng Mechanical & Electrical Co.
Design description: PRORIL transformed from the traditional pump OEM to establish its own brand, and create a dynamic and professional brand image for the international market. The brand identity is formed by simplifying the concept of upward rotation of water in the pumping process. In the design and application of the dynamic visual structure of the unique identification elements, and other competing brands to make a comparison, the visual performance of the variability, but also have a consistent brand characteristics.
Located among the farmlands of Dashe, and passing by dairy cattle farms on the way, the PRORIL factory, just like a traditional small and medium-sized enterprise, has a simple and unassuming appearance. Upon our arrival, the employees who were originally busy at work took the initiative to greet us with smiles and asked about our intentions, as if they were receiving guests from afar. Some helped to show the way, while others prepared tea, and their actions were full of the enthusiasm of Southern Taiwan, and at the same time gave us a sense of the staff's sense of identity and centripetal force towards the company, and they really treated the company's affairs as their own affairs.
PRORIL Vice President Wu Shidun said, like other traditional OEM industry, do OEM do decades, and then through traders to sell products in the form of OEM to foreign companies, such a model is not unable to survive, but in the face of increasingly fierce competition from manufacturers in other countries, how long can such a model go? In addition, OEM and OEM factories often sell their products and then there is no further information, they do not get the product market information and use feedback, they do not know how to correct, but if the product cannot keep pace with market demand, continuous evolution and improvement, the competitiveness of the product will naturally be weak. Therefore, the establishment of a brand, Wu Shidun believes that it is necessary to take the road, "because, everyone wants to do things well," he explained. Because everyone wants to do things right," he explains.
Brand building is the process of recognizing yourself
However, it is always easy to feel inexplicable fear of the unknown, of changing the status quo, of stepping out of one's comfort zone, so how do we convince the whole company? Wu Shidun said, let's start with the product design, the most concrete changes, but also the most acceptable to everyone, after all, who does not want their products look more professional, better looking? So as early as 2009, we invited several design companies and government-commissioned units to evaluate the project, but after contacting them, they all thought that this kind of traditional company with OEM background didn't seem to be very suitable for branding, or they didn't know how to start with the industry, until they turned to Process, which was the only company that cared about how to help them improve their commercial value and business through the overall branding design. At that time, Mr. Wu mentioned that Process was the only company that cared about how to enhance their business value and business through overall branding design, so they have since embarked on the road of transforming their branding to give their company a complete overhaul.
Just try hard and do it, everything is always corrected anyway.
However, it was not until 2013 that PRORIL really started to cooperate with Pro, investing in brand building, and then it took another 3 years to thoroughly implement the brand at all levels of execution, which was recognized by Good Design Japan as "an indicator of the visualization of brands in the traditional industry". Why did the process take so long? For this reason, Wu Shidun said that SMEs have to do a lot of work to establish their own brands, one of which is to start with internal reorganization, and to establish the central spirit and values of the enterprise from organizing past data.
"For the older generation, who have been in the industry for decades, if you ask them what their strengths are, sometimes they can't tell you, because doing things right has long been taken for granted," he added. He added, "But branding is all about corporate identity, and in order for people to recognize us, we have to recognize ourselves first. Therefore, we have to organize our past data to find out the DNA of our company and design a brand that fits our corporate spirit. Meanwhile, we can gradually build up a sense of identity and centripetal force by making constant corrections in the process." He added, "But branding is corporate identity.
While constantly trying to make mistakes, Mr. Wu is not afraid of his employees' mistakes, "No one is born knowing how to do it, it's just a middle school thing to do, and it's good to fix your mistakes. It is necessary to take every step steadily, so that everyone can steadily bear the new impact brought by the change.
With the brand, with elegance and equality.
To coincide with the launch of the new brand, S.D. Wu chose to participate in the Italy Professional Show as the first exposure of PRORIL, as the European market is a very important market for PRORIL. In particular, Stanton avoided the most competitive area of the Taiwan booth, and chose a larger and relatively quiet booth to show off the brand in a relaxed manner.
"To me, the success of a company does not only come from the growth of business volume, but also from the value of people. If managers only keep asking for results, employees will end up using all kinds of tactics to achieve them, and such results will be empty because when employees leave, the results will disappear, and so will the value of the company. So I hope that they will not go around soliciting business like the traditional trade show model, but will gracefully show up in front of you, sit down, and chat with each other in a relaxed and equal manner," said Mr. Wu.
Sure enough, this move successfully attracted European customers to take the initiative to contact, Fong Sheng is no longer an unknown OEM factory, but a name, a professional image of the enterprise, which of course, greatly enhance the trust of customers, so they are willing to order directly from PRORIL, and at the same time, the business tentacles, but also slowly extended to the original traders are not good at the Southeast Asian market. In just over a year's time, PRORIL has not only slowly made up for the original cooperation with traders in terms of revenue and profit, but also continued to accumulate and increase.
Although the process of brand building involves a lot of costs in terms of manpower, time, money, etc., if we look at it in retrospect, we will find that it actually saves money instead.
Wu Shidun said: Because the Process brand initially extends the design concept to all manuals, information sheets, quotations, websites, exhibition venue layout and other interfaces, which can then be directly copied and applied, and at the same time, through brand management, to help PRORIL continue to maintain its image, regularly review and amend the direction to ensure the sustainable development of corporate brand. For example, in the case of exhibition venue decoration, every time we participate in an exhibition, we have to spend a considerable amount of money to set up the venue again, but now we can reuse it and make it clear to the public at a glance; and manual design, we don't have to re-tender the contract every year, which saves a lot of time and money. Even the product design, with a clear brand image to define the norms, the design can be more focused on the firepower, no longer shooting at birds.
For the front-line staff, since the establishment of the brand, the challenge has actually become more, PRORIL development department chief Wu Changyou said, not only in the process of establishing the brand, we have to learn a lot of new methods and concepts, and now we also began to receive product market information and user feedback, which will force us to study how to correct the product, back to deepen the quality of their own products, and the quality control will require more stringent, and even how to pack the carton to withstand the weight of the pump, easy to collision damage, have become more calculating. Stricter requirements on quality control, and even the packaging carton, how to withstand the weight of the pump, not easy to collision damage, have become more calculated up. "We have a brand name, and we can't afford to jeopardize it," said Mr. Wu. Mr. Wu said.
PRORIL's multiple awards have greatly increased the brand's visibility in the marketplace, and given customers and distributors a sense of trust in the company. But this is just the beginning, says Mr. Wu. Next, they will be expanding their warehouse and factory to make the entire production line look more professional and spacious. "We've done such a good job designing for us, so there's still a lot more we have to do," he says with a smile. Wu Shidun said with a smile.