Branding for Startups (Important Stuff)

Of course, if you look at the top 100 brands last year in Business Week, none of the Asian ones was on the list. Branding has only just begun in Asian business culture. Our resident contributor, Der Shing, one of the winners in the Spirit of Enterprise 2006, will discuss the importance of branding for startups and how to sustain the kind of branding not just by setting up a portal alone.

Contributed by Lim Der Shing

Thought I will share my experience about branding and the importance of building your own brand. In hindsight and for some of you, this may seem to be very obvious. However, I think for startups struggling to make ends meet, having revenue perhaps matters more than having your brand but low revenue. Let me elaborate.

I notice that quite a lot of service firms in Singapore leverage on their partner/client’s brands to deliver what is essentially their product. For example, magazine industry has lots of contract magazine publishers who will do the artwork, editorial, sales, printing etc for a big brand. They get paid a fixed fee and a variable depending on sales. They may even get to keep all sales and no fixed fee. However end of the day, the brand is not theirs. So all effort put into building it goes to naught. Krisflyer, AA magazine, AlumNUS etc, anyone knows who actually does all the work?

A similar situation can be found in dot commers. Many dot commers get distracted. They start with a great idea. Job Portal, Food Review, some Web2.0 stuff, but when they built their prototype, it takes a long time to grow it. Along comes an appreciative client who asks them to customize something and build and maintain it for them. Most startups will take it, cuz it generates some $$. But as time goes by, the client’s site and brand is the one who grows strong. And all efforts spent improving it goes to the client not yours.

What I am driving at is that while it is important to do adhoc work and skills related work (design, editorial, IT contracting), never lose sight of your core business plan. Of course, unless your business is to be a contract service provider! At the first chance, use all revenue to grow your brand and strengthen your own position.

A good example is Shareinvestor.com. Their clients came to them to do online IR pages. They made it into a core service and integrated it with their forum and investor information offerings. Now they are pretty dominant in Singapore in their niche market worth easily 3-4M a year.