Branding and boosting sales while avoiding a full price war

These topics are hotly discussed in highly competitive markets when companies are pressured to boost sales figures within short deadlines.

But the more challenging question is how companies should balance their brand image while being pressured to reduce prices. Even though price-cutting is believed to be the fastest way of boosting sales, this is achieved at a cost to other areas such as profitability, product quality and how customers view the brand.

The biggest problem for property-brand builders is finding ways of creating a unique campaign to boost sales without offering outright price cuts. It requires designing graphics and campaign names as well as managing communication channels so people with purchasing power and the need to find homes feel that the brand is trustworthy and associated with quality products rather than being a company that churns out projects for discounting.

For example, AP’s "Final Call" campaign is pitched as offering the best price for all units in every location. After thinking of a suitable campaign name presented in understated yet easy-to-understand advertisements with carefully controlled and crafted images, colours and shading, similar advertisements for different projects were rolled out across Bangkok.

The intention is to create a solid impact and draw consumers to the brand through constant exposure and imprinting in their memory.

All these effects are formed outside the sales gallery when many consumers do not even have direct experience with the products or having entered a single project, but these impressions can collectively spark consumers’ imagination about the brand through various media.

Though creating these images in consumers’ minds to stimulate their interest in the brand’s product and service quality is difficult, it is vital to first end property companies’ addiction to price cutting. This habit creates an endless vicious cycle when consumers continue to believe in the value of getting the lowest price, and they can get it from sales staff.

Instead, we should understand that every product will have different strengths compared with rivals, so it is important that we add more value to what we already have, improve our weak points, and make price-cutting the absolute last resort. Then we communicate the value proposition of the product and the experience of living in that project that has been adjusted to offer something new to customers.

In battling this negative cycle, marketers have to resist calls to lower prices even though this can be done easily.

While it may take time for customer experience to create an impact on sales as demanded by the management, persevering is the only way to escape this downward cycle.

If we refuse to end discounting, we are letting these discount-price addicts continue to walk down the wrong path, and customers will never be satisfied. That is why we can see that many campaigns that focus on lowering prices are less successful over time because prices cannot be lowered indefinitely.

Sales staff should be trained to sell without offering discounts whenever potential clients request them. Consequently, budgets to improve brand image are often cut to accommodate discounts.

If we do not begin addressing this issue, companies may lower investments to maintain profit margin, which will eventually have an impact on the quality of the product and its services, and damage the brand’s image and value in the long term.

Creating a strong organisation respected for the quality of its products and its brand is fundamental to long-term success, and it can only be built and maintained by visionary leaders at the management and operational levels willing to change corporate culture and their employees’ behaviour. Making this change happen is not the work of the brand-building team alone but requires moving the entire organisation together in the same direction.