Not enough for Lankan companies to directly transplant products – Al Ries
To win globally, it is not enough for Sri Lankan companies to take their products and transplant them directly into international markets, says “Positioning” pioneer Al Ries.
According to Mr. Ries, “Everybody thinks that the best strategy is to take an established brand and expand on it by taking it to a global market. We think the opposite, narrow the focus. What will help the economy of Sri Lanka is building global brands but what companies have to realise is when they go out, they will have to narrow their focus, they can’t be selling everything”.
He also added “a country doesn’t get rich by selling products internally.
For example, the richest country in the world is Qatar, but it didn’t get rich selling oil to their Qatari residents. They got rich by selling oil to the world”.
Commenting further, he noted that, “if Sri Lanka wants to improve its economy, it has to have many more businesses out in the world. To build a global business you need brands; that’s where marketing comes in, where you need a narrowed focus. You can’t take your product line, which works in Sri Lanka, and transplant it directly abroad”.
At the same time, on making a recommendation on building a brand, which was relevant for any company, no matter where in the world it was based, Mr.Ries made the following suggestion: “We also believe that every marketing campaign should start with Public Relations (PR). Our philosophy is PR first, to establish the brand, advertising second to maintain the brand.
It’s not that advertising can’t be used for launching a brand, but it’s not very good. If people see an advertisement for a new brand, without PR first, they say it can’t be any good because we have never heard of it”.
Speaking to the Business Times during a recent visit to Sri Lanka, where he headlined the annual conference for the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), Sri Lanka Region, Mr. Ries also went on to say, “I’ve been all around the world, but I did not know Sri Lanka existed. Having said that, I’m very impressed with Sri Lanka. For one thing, I didn’t know it was an island. In general, you don’t think of a country as an island. Most countries don’t have a lot of water. But Sri Lanka being an island makes it a very nice place for tourism”.
However, he also noted that Sri Lanka could do much more in the area of tourism. He opined, looking at the numbers, tourism is only 1.3 per cent of GDP for Sri Lanka, which was low considering a destination like Florida, which had similar year-round warm weather and beaches. Further, he also commented that Florida garnered a significant portion of the domestic US tourism share, which was also separate from the big numbers of tourists visiting from all over the world.
Al Ries
Additionally, Mr. Ries also signalled that another avenue for this country to explore was a cooperative for tea growers. He was of the view that tea growers had to come together and market black, green and white teas as brand names, otherwise they were just competing against each other.
Giving his view on the increased emphasis on digital marketing in today’s world, Mr. Ries usurped conventional wisdom by suggesting that forays into the digital world were solely tactical in nature. He said, “marketing can be roughly divided into strategy and tactics. Digital is a tactic but not a strategy. Digital is important, but strategy is always more important than tactics. As consultants, we focus on strategy. So, people on the ground in Sri Lanka, knowing the market much better than we do, for many years, are much better at physical aspects of a marketing programme here (tactics), where we might be better on the strategy”.
He continued, “fundamentally, tactics have been moving from print and magazines, to digital. In the US, the only medium that has held up is TV.
Magazines and trade magazines have really declined and TV has maintained the same ratings. Oddly enough, there is another idea we talk about in our presentations. We think the digital medium is particularly for Public Relations”.
Speaking on the lack of appropriate budgets available to build brands effectively, Mr. Ries highlighted one big reason as being that “most management people do not believe it is the name of the brand or the promise of the brand that will make the difference; they believe it is the quality of the product that will win the market. So the real issue is not so much what we call line extensions, but does the better product win in the market?
I can see why people believe it, it is the very essence of fairness. Most people want to believe this. After all, shouldn’t the most qualified person in a company be its CEO?”
Contributing a truly out-of-the-box idea to the discussion, Mr. Ries also considered the benefits of Sri Lanka versus the country’s previous name, Ceylon. He further theorised that, for some, the “change in name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka has been perceive as a negative. If Sri Lanka is a better name, replacing the name on a product should (add value). If you replace Ceylon Tea with Sri Lanka Tea, tea prices may collapse. So, how are you going to get people as tourists? Publicity and PR. You change Sri Lanka back to Ceylon, and you’ll immediately get tons of international publicity”.
However, he noted that this was just a thought and real world cultural sensitivities may make it impractical.
On the other hand, he did advise, “for millions or even billions globally, Ceylon is synonymous with the best tea in the world. What Sri Lanka needs the most are tourists; so you connect tea and tourism. Thinking about business, we have worked with a lot of islands, for example, Jamaica, where we’ve found that the best thing you can do for business is promote the islands as tourist destinations for CEOs and business leaders, so they can visit the island as tourists, allowing them to discover the island as a business destination”.