>> That said, sports marketing can be very expensive.
To be 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.
>> [LAUGH] 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.
>> Right.
>> 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.