Past iadvisory Questions and Answers: Branding in Vietnam

Read to find out how our iadvisor tackles the issue of branding an industrial product in Vietnam.

My company is in the chemical coating business and we are interested to penetrate the Vietnamese market. Can you advise how best my company can introduce a new product successfully into the coating industry in Vietnam?

There are a few things that you need to do:

1. Find a great name for your product. Even industrial products need to be properly named. The name should be easy-to-pronounce, easy-to-remember, English-sounding, short (one to four syllables), unique (meaning no one else has it), does not make use of generic words, acronyms and is language/religion neutral (meaning it doesn’t mean anything bad in Vietnamese).

2. Find a differentiator for your brand. How are you different from your competitors who are already selling in Vietnam? If you cannot find a differentiator, you will have to sell cheap. After all, if your customers can’t tell the difference between you and the other brands, they will just buy whoever is cheaper and that may not be you.

Very briefly, the 13 ideas that you can use to differentiate your brand effectively are:

a. Sales Leadership
b. Technology Leadership
c. Performance Leadership
d. The Next Generation
e. How a Product Is Made
f. Where a Product Is Made
g. Attribute Ownership
h. Personality
i. Opposite Position
j. Specialisation
k. Preference
l. Heritage
m. Design

Also dramatize your differentiator – make it larger-than-life and capture that in a nice tagline.

3. Communicate your brand and its differentiating idea to your potential customers in Vietnam. For a B2B brand, the better way to reach out to customers is through public relations (PR) and tradeshows because the number of potential customers you have is limited.

PR refers to what the media say about you. The relevant media could be newspapers or trade magazines. Tradeshows are also good as many buyers go to tradeshows so you can reach out to them quite easily. But you would need to get your name and your differentiating idea right first.

All answers are provided to the best knowledge of the iadvisors at the point of answering, and are solely represented by the iadvisors, not IE Singapore.

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