Many Vietnamese SMEs lack long-term strategies to build their brands. (Photo: vnreview.vn) Hanoi (VNA) - Vietnamese businesses lack a proper strategy to build brands, asurvey by British brand consultant Mibrand has found.
Anonline survey last month of 200 small and medium-sized firms in Hanoi and HCMCity in many sectors like IT, finance and banking, retail, insurance,healthcare, and dining services found most of them building their brands bythemselves but without having the tools for it.
Amongthe biggest problems Vietnamese firms face when building brands are the lack ofan instruction toolkit and standard methods to assess outcomes, Phung Thai Duongof Mibrand said.
Somecompanies do hire a professional agency or consultancy to help with thebranding, but face challenges like high fees, the outside experts not having athorough understanding of the company’s situation, and inability to evaluatethe outcomes since they are not provided the tools for it, he said.
“Businessesshould only hire an agency for branding once they have scaled up. For newlyestablished businesses and start-ups, it is not a good choice.”
Nearly90 percent of the firms in the survey said they were in need of a brandingstrategy but developing it was not an easy task.
Thereasons include not all members of the management understanding thesignificance of branding and the marketing team’s lack of practical experiencein developing a long-term plan for branding, making it hard to persuade themanagement to spend money on marketing activities.
Anexecutive from Golden Path Academics Vietnam, which operates in the educationsector, said when the company was established in 2011 its marketing andcommunication activities were done “quite simply” without any strategies makingit hard to find customers. It had also lacked expert branding strategists, theexecutive said.
Lai TienManh, director of Mibrand, said to have an effective long-term branding planbusinesses need to position and reposition their brands, acquire brandingexperts, and constantly improve branding behaviours based on assessing andmeasuring the effectiveness of communication and marketing activities.
Hesaid the last task can now be done with the help of Branding 4.0 Toolkit andBrand Beat Score developed by his company.
“Thesetools offer a solution to companies for building and managing brands. They alsohelp companies address challenges related to communications such as helpingthem develop ideas for long-term communications strategies.”
Companiesshould develop a branding strategy that meets the needs of their targetconsumers and business activities and also helps improve the marketing team’s capacity,he added.-VNA
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