Branding Taiwan

I just saw an article on China Economic News (CENS) on how Taiwan companies are trying to develop their own international brands. Many/most successful companies in Taiwan are successful OEM/ODM/EMS/Contract manufacturers (take your pick). Two outstanding examples are Hon-Hai and Quanta. However, there are also some very successful and increasingly ubiquitous brands including ACER, ASUS, TrendMicro and Giant.

Apparently some manufacturers are now looking to develop their own brands. As one of my MBA professors said to me a few years ago, there is very little money on the manufacturing side of the value chain. Many companies in Taiwan have developed strong foreign customers who have their own brands and make enormous profits through their own brand equity. The Taiwanese manufacturers on the other hand only reap small profits. They are now looking to redress this imbalance.

However, CENS observes:

Brand development requires the devotion of more effort to the cultivation of talent, and to the encouragement of talented personnel to explore their creativity and innovation in the development of unique products. Such efforts are often seen in high-tech industries, and some domestic high-tech firms have been well rewarded for the development of their own brands. Among these success stories are Asus, TrendMicro, D-Link, and BenQ, all of which made the list of Taiwan`s top 10 brands in 2007.

And here is the problem! Many Taiwan companies are run, in a fellow writer's words "like giant Mom 'n Pop stores." Very little attention is given to external communications. Websites are usually an absolute mess with very little consistency in terminology and very little thought as to what the value-proposition of the company and the product is.

Many companies also resort to phrases like the one above, "Brand development requires the devotion of more effort to the cultivation of talent, and to the encouragement of talented personnel...," which actually says very little about what actually needs to be done. Company CEOs are also very strong minded about how they perceive the marketing material should be and even if the company slogan is grammatically incorrect in English, they will not change it because they like it.

Many Taiwanese companies think the product is good enough to establish the brand of the company. I beg to differ! I would even argue they should know better. Most companies have grown up through manufacturing and should surely realize by now how easy it is to make stuff.

Communications is the key! Yet they place so little emphasis on communicating what their company is about and, when they do communicate, many of the press releases are a grammatical mess which are really difficult to read. This is true even for some companies on Interbrand's Top Taiwan Brand list.

If Taiwanese companies are truly interested in developing strong brands, they really need to pay attention to their communications at all levels. Productivity is good and innovation critical but communicating clearly and concisely (although this post is certainly not concise) is also important.

(Article: Taiwan Brands Make Inroads in Global Market)