Branding in Thailand

Your brand is your face, your handshake, and your identity. Some may even regard it as the life and soul of your business or product, and it is the thing that is likely to draw in and capture the hearts of consumers or B2B buyers, which is how you foster customer loyalty to your offering.

Branding is important because it gives you name recognition and value creation. Consider for a moment when we shop for a product and see unbranded or OEM listings from unknown sellers, on platforms like Lazada ; what do we think about those products? It is natural to assume they are of lower value, or of lower performance, than products offered by a famous brand we recognise. This may not even be true; perhaps that brand actually gets its products from the OEM supplier – but it doesn’t matter, as much of the “value”, or perceived value, of an offering is in its brand differentiation and intrinsic “reliability”.

Before we unleash our business concept or celebrity profile on the planet, we need to clearly define ourselves. The positioning statement is a short paragraph which clearly sets out where we see ourselves as “existing.” For companies, it defines our position (or desired position) in the market; for individuals, it sets out where we see ourselves both professionally and in the social space.

When we write a positioning statement, we are creating an easy-to-understand blueprint for a great number of messages which will spring from it. We noted earlier that key messages are everything in public relations, but before we can design effective messaging, we need to create a stable base.

As individuals, we may wish to grow our public profile with philanthropy and charity work, but first we must create our personal positioning. We will begin by writing a simple positioning statement for ourselves which includes both professional and personal aims and achievements. For example, a rising golf star may define themselves thusly: “Jani Smith is a 3-times national PGA golfing champion, a keen supporter of youth development in the sport, dedicated philanthropist and contributor to a number of local sports charities.”

The biography (or bio) is a more detailed document relating to the individual. Whereas the positioning statement refers to an overview of a company or organisation, the bio details the professional experience and achievements of any number of individuals within that organisation. Where we are a private person trying to grow our own public positioning through PR, we will write both documents. Companies will produce ONE positioning statement and possibly MANY biographies (usually only for high level staff members).

Our positioning statement is a fine tool for basing all of our future communication writing upon, but there is also a need to explain in more detail about WHO we are, WHAT we have done in our career so far, and what we are currently hoping to achieve.

The Bio can almost be thought of as a summary of one’s resume or CV; whereas your resume may be several pages long and contain a list of dates when you worked with certain companies, the bio will crush all this down to three or four paragraphs and sift out the non-dazzling stuff.

The Bio serves us when we are an employee of a company AND also when we are a sole trader or public personality looking to define what it is about us that makes us interesting and highly skilled.

Don’t worry, Gemini will create all this for you.

Some may simply think of this in terms of, “just create a brand name, website and a logo”. Others may respond by stating that it takes decades to create true brand value and a marque that people trust. Can I really just create a brand from scratch? Well, yes, you can. This is not that dissimilar to what we did with Gemini at the outset, prior to our quick rise through the industry, of course.

One of the biggest things you can do to help your newly created brand is to engage a PR firm. This is because the PR agency is well-placed to be able to help you with:

• Branding image & appearance
• Origin story
• Brand positioning
• Defining USPs
• Defining key messages
• Drilling down into branding essence
• Communicating that overall package of measures in a captivating way
• Biographies, as and when required

There is a great deal of crossover between key terms used in the PR industry and when discussing branding and brand marketing. Please view our handy Glossary

This is potentially a massive field of discussion which could (and does) fill volumes of business books. Generally, a few tips to begin thinking about this:

1. Use a logo that conveys an important message about your offering OR use something that is so clean and cool that it does not “get in the way,” and communicate your brand values through other mechanisms and comms means.

2. Define what those brand values are, as this will explain to customers what you value and what you believe in, which is a good connection opportunity and can help to further loyalty whilst attracting new customers with similar values.

3. Have a collection of key visuals, images, videos and aesthetic assets which you would like to use throughout your communications, as this will help greatly down the road as you seek to illustrate your brand story (going backwards, origin) and brand message (going forwards, vision).

4. Have a great press release “template” on record. As well as just announcing news and happenings to media organisations, the press release is a great way to formulate your thoughts on brand positioning, product USPs, your mission/vision and what you would like to say about your forthcoming product release strategy and so forth. This internal press release is not for distribution; it is an internal resource and useful template for creating actual press releases and other communication format documents going forward.

5. Have a great PR partner you can call on. Remember, you don’t need to pay for a full PR retainer with an agency to benefit from their advice. Simply give Gemini a call and get some free advice via the contact form! We also have light-touch PR products available, which for 2000 USD give you all of the PR consulting and branding consulting (Consulting Lite by Gemini^™) benefits of partnering with Gemini but where you create your own communications documents and events yourself. Otherwise, pull the trigger and go fully retained with us! (Retained Services by Gemini^™ – POA)