Taipei Times: After successfully building a world-famous brand and the top brand in Taiwan, what is your advice to Taiwanese companies that are keen to create their own brands?
Steve Chang
Thus, before creating a brand, company executives should know who they are, how they can differentiate from competitors, and what their core-competences are. The executives should also have passion for what they do, so they will keep improving the company.
After setting the tone for the company, the second step is execution. Many companies market their brands by budgeting big money in advertising or acquiring brands of other firms.
Out of the various methods, I think the most fundamental and effective way is establishing a relationship of trust with customers, although it may take a lot of time to build the relationship.
In marketing, word-of-mouth can deliver the highest results. So we can call a brand successful when its customers are willing to recommend its products or services to their friends.
TT: At the award ceremony for Taiwan's top 10 global brands last week, you suggested local companies apply a "blue ocean strategy" instead of a "red ocean strategy." Can you elaborate more on this point?
[Ed. note: In the recent best-selling business book Blue Ocean Strategy, authors suggested companies adopt a "blue ocean strategy" to create an uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant, rather than the "red ocean strategy," with which companies compete in an existing market and undercut competitors as most companies do now].
Chang: The book discusses good business strategies by using simple examples. However, one should understand the concept carefully. Before entering into an untapped market, companies should do a thorough risk-management assessment instead of a judgment based on superficial factors.
One experience I could apply to this concept involves a banana pocket. Once, while meeting with a client in Japan, he presented me with a banana pocket, which he claimed to facilitate the needs of people who love bananas and want to hang one at their waist. The idea sounds good, given a large number of people in Asia are fond of bananas. But the fact is, people have no demand for such a product. Nevertheless, I bought some of the pockets as an example to remind my employees not to repeat the same mistake.
TT: As a Taiwanese, you chose to start your business in the highly competitive US market and to locate your corporate headquarters in Japan. From your perspective, what are the challenges for starting a software business in Taiwan?
Chang: At the time I started my business, Taiwan had very serious problems in software piracy, which hampered the growth of the industry. The US market, though full of tough challenges, has a key role in the development of the software industry.
We cannot reach the highest standards without passing the strictest tests in the US. This is what is described in Chinese as: "One can't catch a tiger without entering the tiger's lair;" or the Western equivalent, "nothing ventured, nothing gained." We also learned how to develop branding and marketing strategies in the US. Today, the piracy problem still exists in Taiwan. Another factor for Taiwan to develop in the software business is the small market; especially in the Internet era, where users in the world are using the same applications. In other words, software developers need to come up with products that can be adopted not only by local users, but by users worldwide.
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