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Asian Home Gourmet is a product brand developed
by Cerebos Pacific Ltd., a Singapore-based company. The brand product range
– spice pastes made from fresh herbs and spices – are high quality
convenience products that help consumers prepare different foods in a
variety of Asian styles. This is a commodity market with a great deal
of competition.
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Competitive Strategies: 2 Types
To stand out from the crowd and
survive in Asia, let alone globally, the brand has to somehow convince the consumer
that it is
different and better. What can Cerebos Pacific do to convince people to
buy its brand, as opposed to the array of competitive sauce additives that
are available around the world?
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Creating Customer Value: 9 Questions To Answer
The answer lies in an insight used to express
Asian values, relative to food, to build the
brand
personality, instead of a traditional approach to
positioning Asian foods.
Most people love food but for Asian people, the link between food and family
values is especially strong. Cooking food in
Asia is not just an act, but a
way of expressing emotion. Like all human beings, Asian people are
emotional, but it is not the Asian way to outwardly express these emotions.
They are, therefore, somewhat repressed. There is also a tremendous respect
for the family as an institution, a value that appears to be, if not on the
decline, certainly less strong in the West. So when Asians cook meals for
their families, it is more an expression of love as opposed to a chore. When
they cook for friends, it is a gesture of respect and happiness for that
friendship. When they cook for someone they love, it is an ingredient of
romance. Food has special status in Asia. As Guy Murphy, strategic planning
director of Bartle, Bogle and Hegarty (BBH), the
advertising agency for Asian Home
Gourmet says: "In Asia, food is a proxy for showing emotion. While people
the world over have an emotional relationship with food, that relationship
appears to be most intense in the Asian region."
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Cultural Differences
BBH devised a campaign that brought together
the brand personality and
Asian values and superbly called, not surprisingly, "Recipes made with
love".
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Customer Care
The television commercials, for example,
animate ingredients like chillies that intertwine with affection and a
family of herbs holding hands.
The product description is: "Our spice pastes
are made from fresh herbs and spices. You can use them to create any one of
a range of authentic Asian dishes. All you have to add is one important
ingredient. A little of yourself."
This is a wonderful example of how an Asian
brand can project itself by projecting a personality based on values from
the region of origin, together with a positioning that combines a
combination of strategies, including emotion. After initially being
available only in Asia, it has gone global in its chosen niche market, using
emotional values that have universal appeal.
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Customer Success 360
Brand strengths: personality; a
combination of features and attributes; rational,
emotional,
and aspirational
positioning strategies; excellent use of animation in demonstrating
brand values.
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