Understand the consumer before marketing a brand, expert says
Audience.
While building a brand is no easy task in today’s context, many world-renowned brands have a success story to narrate to its consumers. The fundamental of building a brand is understanding what a consumer wants when selling or marketing a product or service. You cannot always stick to the local context, but look at the business opportunities from a global point of view, says Vickum Nawagamuwage, Founder of Santani Wellness Resort.
He made this remark during the Sunday Times Business Club (STBC) discussion on ‘Road to Success’ at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo last Tuesday. WSO2 Founder and CEO, Sanjiva Weerawarana also shared his
success story as an entrepreneur. Shangri-La is the host hotel of
the STBC.
He said 35 per cent of guests at Santani are from the Middle East, 30 per cent from Europe, 10 per cent from US, some from India and China and only 3 per cent are local guests. “Our success has been globally recognised. We are looking at expanding our operations in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and multiple projects in Europe,” added Mr. Nawagamuwage.
“Stress is something that is common among a lot of people. Our predecessors did not have much stress as we have today. I wanted to quit the business because of stress, but my father saved me. He is a man who went through bankruptcy running a destination management company, but still managed to take it up with less stress. I researched carefully why the present generation is more stressed than our parents and grandparents. There has been a shift in the stress from the body to the mind. The minute you struggle to do what you have to do, leads to stress. At Santani Resorts it just became a business opportunity to give a solution to those who do not have a proper solution,” noted Mr. Nawagamuwage.
Mr. Weerawarana who started his career as a computer scientist and a technical expert also shared his success story. He returned to Sri Lanka in 2001 after working in the US for 16 years and started a software foundation trying to get local software developers to contribute in creating technology. At that time the local mindset was that there was going to be a consumer of technology, not a place that creates technology. Most of Sri Lanka’s technology companies were interested in selling people and not selling products.
“Today WSO2 has built a brand with value that all our customers come to us and we don’t go and sell to them. We started selling from here, sold it differently, built a better product and did it for free, then people started talking about it and started paying for the value of the product. Our thought process is aiming to become number one in the world in enterprise technology. Today we have more than 730 customers in 94 countries,” stated Mr. Weerawarana.
He also mentioned that as a percentage of the population there are more people employed in the IT sector in Sri Lanka than India. “In 2022 and 2023 there was a massive outflow of skilled people, also the tech market at that time was booming for recruitment. Now it is the opposite, the US has a major shortage of jobs for tech people,” noted Mr. Weerawarana.
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