-JD great to see you. - Great to see you Dae Ryun. - I know you've been coming to Asia for many years. Tell us what you see have been the biggest changes in terms of especially marketing and also branding. - Yeah, it's a great question. So I've been coming here since 2003, so it's been almost 12 years. And it's been pretty interesting to watch because my first impression when I got over here initially was how... at times it felt like much of the marketing that took place was a throwback to the early 1990's or late 1980's in the United States. There was a format of copying of the type of marketing campaigns, the personalities that were used were really a replication of the same sorts of dialogs that we would see in ads in the US for consumer goods. - And... - So what you are saying is that it wasn't original? Almost as if you took a time machine back? - Yeah, and to an exent it was original, it was so colloquial, so local, that it was a very narrow niche audience that they were reaching and you either had extrems of the loud garish western approach or you had the local narrow subset approach that only appealed to a very small audience. And it felt like a region that was trying to find its way in terms of its marketing voice. And it wasn't as if companies were backwards or primitive that's not the issue. The issue is that marketing had never been at the forefront of strategic thinking. It had always been, in fact, a cost, as opposed to an investment in building a strategy. And that to me was interesting because I though Gosh here I am, in another stage of my career, I am in Asia at this new exciting market and the marketing felt very old. But that changed. And that did change fairly quickly and I think part of it is because of the growth of the Asian economies for several years as we know. You had double digit growth, in Korea, and I China of course, and in India and Singapore had a year when they grew 14.5% or something crazy like that. And that, I think, spurred a lot of confidence. Companies started to feel differently about how can they portray themselves. - You talked about Samsung, you talked about Air Asia, and it's no coincidence that they're big investors in sports marketing. So, can you tell us why sports marketing is so important in branding? - Sure. - And why maybe Asian companies value it so much? - Sure. So if you look at the big picture of what a brand is, and you take, for the assumption that a brand is everything the organization stands for, what they're trying to then do, any company's trying to do, is to raise the profile of its brand, meaning the entire organization, in a way where that it creates positive associations for the marketplace. - Right. - And there are conventional execution strategies that we all know as marketers that you can do and it's the four P's of marketing. That's not what sports marketing is necessarily trying to take advantage of. Sports marketing is trying to take advantage of the fact that sports themselves have carved out and crafted and nurtured a fan base, which is a much richer and deeper association with their customers. Their fans are customers that companies would love to have but they don't often get. If you think about your classic sports fan, whatever team you follow, whatever team that I follow, even if they're having a terrible season, we still follow them. And it may be insane and irrational. - There's a loyalty about them. - Yeah, it's an irrational loyalty. [CROSSTALK] Absolutely, and we love that, and we go crazy when they lose but we still follow them passionately. An that level of the association is what companies are looking for when they associate with sports, because there's that rabidity that comes with the sports fan that you don't get with most companies. - Right. - Yeah, their customers are loyal to a point, until the price either is too high or until the quality is different or until a competitor comes along with something better. - Right, right. - But, you know, we are not going to follow the competitor team, even if they have a better team. - Right. - We're going to continue to follow our best, and so the loyalty to sports is very strong. Companies like Air Asia and Samsung want to be associated, Emirates is another one in the Middle East, because they see the value in that very loyal customer base. - Right. - As reaping long time rewards for them. And it's not literally in terms of buying more air tickets or buying more hand phones or anything else, although that is certainly a by-product of this, it's much more around the associations the brand gets as a result of this. - Right. - You sponsor in the Olympics, you gain as benefit that you're doing something that creates additional value for the world, right? It's bringing nations together. Your company gets associated with that and it can help offset some of the rough edges that you might have in other challenging parts of your company. - That said, sports marketing can be very expensive, to be a TOP sponsor the Olympics. That is very expensive. - It is. - So, can you get by investing less but still having sort of the impact through sports? - Sure you can. Yeah, it's a great question in there and you and I have written before too about that, about the idea of investing in a small sport or a small, lesser known athlete in order to boost your brand. Sports does not have to be an investment of $250 million, like it is for the Olympics, in order to reap rewards. Right? So, you can, in many cases, sponsor your local little league team in the United States, because you are a local community member and a contributor. That same model applies. So, there's no real difference in terms of the gain you'll get, because you're still associating with what sports brings which is, their sense of community, and good will, and competition, and all those things are nice lovely associations. And they are separate from sort of the more crass and commercial sides of the commercial world. So absolutely, a small time sport sponsorship works very well. - That's really good news if you don't have the money. - [LAUGHTER] Exactly. - And the sponsor. - That's right, or you could even trade out your goods for... - So what do you think are the challenges for companies going forward, not only in terms of marketing but also branding? - Yeah, the biggest challenges going forward are global in nature. In other words, it's not just specific to companies here in Asia, it's companies everywhere face this. Because of what's happened with technology over the last decade, the control is out of the hands of organizations, and the control is in yours and my hands, as consumers. And that's partly because of social media. We all know that we can pull up our handset and we can interact with anybody in the world. People we haven't met before, but suddenly, their opinion matters to us. And we can quickly spread our own opinion. And if that opinion takes off, it can undermine an otherwise carefully orchestrated campaign. So the challenge any organizations face, Asian or otherwise is how do we influence the touch points in our organization, rather than control them? because you can't control it. You cannot control the marketplace. The moment you try to, the marketplace will react to that. And it'll completely sidetrack your efforts to control it. - Right, right. - So the answer becomes, how do we, instead, build a much stronger internal branding mechanism in our own organizations? - Right. - We're going to turn the camera away from the market toward ourselves. - Yeah. - So that our own employees have a better sense of what we stand for and how to better represent the company whenever they're meeting with suppliers or colleagues in other businesses. Whatever might be, but we need that strong internal brand so that our external brand is much more influential, because we know we can't control it at this stage, and I think that's going to be an ongoing challenge because the genie is now out of the bottle. The technology is everywhere. There's even articles these days now about fear of AI overtaking the world and humans will become an extinct species. - Right [LAUGHTER]. - Well, maybe that's a little bit extreme. - God forbid. - God forbid, exactly. But I think it does suggest the idea that with technology driving so much of our marketer's agenda now, we almost have to get back to the days of what it means to really run an organization in a way where people feel inspired to be there. because if they feel inspired to be there, then the chances of all the touch points working together harmoniously is much greater than in a command and control setting, where people feel like they're being told what to do and/or having to respond to things that they can't possibly control. - And in terms of the engagement of the customer, that's where sports marketing can be actually very effective. - It is! Absolutely! I mean, you think about the dynamic between sports teams or sports leagues or even your favorite athlete, and you and I, we can subscribe to anything. We can subscribe to Yao Ming's latest buzzfeed and see what he's thinking about and the communities he's serving now and the things he's doing with his post career success. And we could do the same thing with David Beckham. We could do the same thing, you name the athlete. And that personal connection is something that we all crave, right? We want to be closer to success, it's almost like our own personal zelig moment. But it's actually a lovely thing that, if athletes can find a way to connect more to their markets, it's a great analog for companies connecting more to their markets. And that, to me, is where I think this is all going to go ultimately. It's a much more personal approach to this. - Right, yeah. Okay, thank you so much, JD. Good to see you. - Thank you too. - Yeah.
