If you think your family business is an underdog story, listen to this one.
“My father started out with nothing more than two rice bowls and four chopsticks,” says Phuong Uyen Tran in her new book Competing With Giants.
The Vietnam company grew so large that reportedly Coca-Cola wanted to buy it for more than $2 billion. Her father is chairman and CEO of the beverage company Tan Hiep Phat (THP). He turned down the offer from Coca-Cola.
The company now supplies beverages, including herbal and green teas, sports and energy drinks, soy milk and purified water across Vietnam plus 16 other countries, including China and Australia.
“He persevered because he had tenacity and placed his trust in his core values and people - his business associates, employees and customers,” says Tran.
I interviewed Tran by email to get her best David vs. Goliath marketing tips. Tran is deputy CEO of the THP Beverage Group, a leading beverage company in Vietnam that was founded by her father. She is responsible for the company’s marketing, public relations, and CSR programs nationally and across Vietnam’s 63 provinces. She also leads THP’s international marketing programs across 16 countries where THP’s products are distributed, including Canada and China.
Tran says the best marketing tip for a local company is to simply do more with less. To do this, local companies need to exploit every natural advantage, utilizing the classic four Ps of marketing: place, price, production and promotion.
“Of the four Ps of marketing, place is often listed last, but it is dangerous to assume it is the least important,” says Tran. “In fact, it is the other way around. And when it comes to understanding place, no companies are better placed than the local ones, which are indigenous to their local market.”
As a local company, Tran says THP leverages on the intimacy it has with its customer on local soil. Creating a successful product hinges on understanding the place it comes from or is being sold to. “Some consumers pay very close attention to the place where a company or product originates, because they want to support their local community,” says Tran.
For local business Davids, marketing the product locally has some major advantages over the Goliaths because they can leverage customer insight more quickly.
“Local companies can get products to market much faster than multinationals because they are less bureaucratic and far more entrepreneurial,” says Tran. “Even when expanding new product lines, local companies can act quickly, so they can easily remove products that are not working even if preliminary customer research had suggested they would.”
The marketing strategy Tran found to be most successful was a relentless focus on the differentiation to respond to consumer desires.
“For example, in a beverage market like Vietnam, tea is generally available at no cost,” says Tran. “THP created a market for a product called Green Tea Ready to Drink. Lipton also tried to enter this market but failed. We succeeded because we better understood the direction the consumer market was trending and the opportunity to market and promote the right product in exactly the right way. In the first three months of the marketing campaign, the volume of the Green Tea Ready to Drink product skyrocketed surpassing the anticipated volume for the entire year. Nine years after the launch, this product is still exclusive in the market.”
The company goal for the next three years is to grow annual revenues by 50 percent.
“It is never easy to compete with giants,” says Tran in her book, “let alone face them down.”
