Ngai Yuen Low is AEON Group Malaysia’s Chief Merchandise and Marketing Officer. She sat down with Seamless Xtra at the Seamless KSA event in Riyadh to discuss the perils of brand-building and creating long-lasting connections with consumers.
Yuen, start-ups across all industries will be looking to the year ahead and thinking about how they can build their brand. Even older, more established companies will be thinking along similar lines of how they can make their brand stronger. What is one thing that all of these decision-makers need to be aware of in 2024?
When you brand build you have to be very clear whether it is a long-term strategy or it is really a test strategy for short term. When it is a test strategy, you can name it whatever just to test it. But even then, you need to be wary and understand that there is an opportunity that this name is going to stick and what this brand stands for is going to stick. So, this is really the thing you have to be aware of right from the very beginning. You have to make sure that you can last the test of time. Thirty, forty, fifty years from now you should be able to look back and still be very happy with the brand direction you’ve set up.
What are some of the things I need to consider then once I have adopted this long-term mindset?
So the first thing you need to do is be very clear in your real proposition to the customer. And you have to do this in an objective manner. If you identify a real need, the chances are it is quite difficult to fulfill. In today’s climate and constant competitiveness, everything is almost fulfilled so you need to be clear on what else you are going to do that’s so different. That is most important.
Then, of course, you will talk about branding and branding is very subjective. The naming of it is very subjective. It’s subjective not just to who you are but also to your background, your language, what you’re influenced by and where you are geographically. The naming itself is very subjective so it is really about giving meaning to the brand name.
Is it fair to say that is one of the biggest challenges facing most businesses? Why do you think businesses find this so hard to achieve?
Yes, it’s a big challenge. In fact, fulfilling a need and giving a brand meaning is the most difficult thing to do. Firstly, we need to stop talking about brand building from the point of view of corporate social responsibility.
The other big mistake is that most businesses imagine that brand building is a one-off exercise. You brand build and create awareness right now before moving on to the next phase, which could be recruitment or something else. But it’s really not like that. You have to brand build all the time. In fact, in every single thing that you do, you need to already think, how is your brand really serving the needs. Those brands that last so many years into the future do so because they really did something right and because they continuously build on the brand.
You mention corporate social responsibility. How is this linked to brand building or otherwise?
To give you an example, it’s very easy for a lot of people to think they are a social entrepreneur because they may be hiring marginalised youth who are unemployed. But that doesn’t make their proposition any stronger than everybody else who may be hiring them too. And if that’s the case, then in the end that’s not going to be a proposition at all. It is not about telling people in a fancy way that you serve hungry people as that’s what all F&B outlets do. Just because you may have a fancy way of putting it does not mean you actually have a unique proposition and it won’t help your business last the test of time.
Let’s touch on the work you do with Malaysia’s AEON Group. If I was to ask a consumer what is the key characteristic of AEON Group that keeps them coming back time and time again what is the one thing you would hope they would say?
Trust. They trust that whatever products they put on the shelf, they know we have gone through the process stringently to put it on the shelf. They don’t have to consider if it’s outdated, if it’s not good quality, if it’s not certified or if it’s done badly. They don’t have to consider any of that. They can just pick it up and have no doubt. They can believe that we’ve done all the necessary steps to put the best on the shelf and put choices for them to choose as well.
I guess it goes without saying that trust is something every brand would want to have
It’s a different kind of trust. Let’s take some fast food, for example. The trust here would be, you can trust that I’m offering you this product, at this price, at any time and you can get your stomach full. But you cannot trust me for making sure you get your nutrients. And you definitely do not trust me for making sure that I’m providing the best food for your children.
In that case, can you explain into how the AEON brand might go about building but also maintaining that key principle of trust?
So AEON is a household name and people associate it with trade of all kinds. We are a general merchandise store that provide your general needs and we are also a supermarket chain. At AEON one of the key things, for example, is to talk about freshness and get across the message of what we are doing in freshnessbecause not everyone can do that. It’s important to talk about how we participate in the farm’s way of developing the vegetables before they are put on the shelf. And even to make sure that the farm is feedingthe vegetables with the best quality nutrients before we bring them to the consumer. It is important to talk about how many handlers there are in between and whether we can cut this down because this will mean it’s more hygienic and fresher when it is delivered to the store. Those are the things that interfere and there are many steps to make sure it gets on the shelf properly.
You need to allow your brand to give the full breadth of experience to the consumers and customers. But the thing is, not every brand can do that. Take fast food, banking, or even healthcare. You can only tell them, you trust me. You can’t really be a part of the entire process. So, by being transparent and enabling consumers to really understand how serious the food process this is, this is how we can create greater trust in our brand.
Founded in 1758, AEON is clearly one of the older, more established brands that has stood the test of time. Does that actually work against you at times? When it comes to things like the Metaverse what has your approach been so far?
Yes, when you grow, there’s such a thing called a conflict to your success. But it’s important to understand that the innovation we’re providing is in the daily things that we do. And not necessarily things that will trend today, and be gone tomorrow.
We’ve done some work in the metaverse space. We’ve done some work but as a whole we haven’t really gotten to a space yet where I can very proudly say it can be end to end. So, in the Metaverse I’ve built communities who have gotten our assets, but then this community needs to be sustained through our membership platform and that may take another two years before we reach that stage. The Metaverse community is expecting but it’s fragmented because there isn’t yet a platform to continuously engage. Because we are using a different platform for different things, that disconnect is a huge conversation and it’s a gap that needs to be closed as soon as we can.
