Thailand: Tiger Beer wins brand-building award

Unless you are a fan of a particular football team, you'll remember a beer logo on a footballer's shirt, The Nation reported December 7.

In football-crazy countries like the United Kingdom, beer companies have to make their brands stand out from the crowd of sponsors of football teams and tournaments. They need all-round marketing efforts.

Tiger Beer has done exactly that in the UK, and an indication of its success in brand-building is the CoolBrands award it has received for three consecutive years.

As Tiger doesn't have a massive marketing budget to get its logo plastered on big-team footballers, it goes for a moderate approach in its sponsorship of the Arsenal team with a budget that doesn't make it to the team shirts.

Never mind that it doesn't fight on the field as Tiger's marketing also relies much on two core Asian cultural products - food and films.

"A brand like ours has to be innovative: we don't have money like the big boys," said Bennett GS Neo, the Singaporean managing director of Tiger Beer in the UK, who oversees the Scandinavian markets.

"Our ethos is whispering, not shouting," he said. If a logo on a big football team shirt is a shout, Tiger rather whispers repeatedly through other channels.

During the last few years, Tiger beer has whispered by sponsoring a number of Asian cultural events in the UK, including London's Asian Film Festival, Bruce Lee's 65th anniversary, the Martial Arts Festival and Asian food festivals.

"We started to pay attention to relating our product to Asian things three to four years ago. Asian films have grown rapidly in the UK market, a market now reaching Bt708 million a year. Nobody is more suitable than us in Asian film sponsorship, because our image is the Pan-Asian beer," said Neo.

Instead of labelling Tiger as a Singaporean beer, Neo said, by referring to its brand as Pan-Asian the product has more advantages in marketing. Tiger imports beers from Singaporean and Chinese breweries, though all ingredients are imported from European countries.

"It doesn't matter as long as it's brewed in Asia with an Asian taste and feeling, because our positioning is as an imported premium lager beer.

"Singapore is best known as an efficient and well organised country, so it doesn't relate to any 'cool' feeling. The brand positioning allows it to blend the product with any Asian event including Chinese New Year or the Songkran Festival," he said.

Good examples, according to Neo, are Japanese Asahi and Chinese Tsing Tao beer. He cited both as brands that have strong nationality and therefore limited marketing opportunities.

Neo believes Asian is more appealing and Tiger has advantages from that. The company positions the beer as premium imported lager and has no plans to clash with mainstream beers like Carlsberg and Budweiser. Tiger beers have been available in the UK for decades, but the company just started its operation last year.

It is fierce competition in the UK, though Tiger plans not to engage in a price war. "It is easy to discount 20 per cent, but I don't believe in it," Neo said.

With the recognition of a good marketing mix, Neo hopes even without price-cutting, Tiger will climb to be among the top three in the premium-import segment. The brand now ranks fifth in the segment.

That goal means its sales have to double. "What we would very much love to achieve is to be the number-one Asian beer," he said.

Tiger's biggest markets are Vietnam and Cambodia. In Thailand, Tiger is still a fairly new brand with only a five-year presence in the market. In Southeast Asia, Tiger is more aggressive in sports marketing, perhaps because it doesn't need that skyrocketing budget.

The company has founded the Tiger Football Club for football fans to join in activities with chances to win tickets to see football in England. It also sponsors a tournament in Vietnam and the Asian Cup, formerly known as the Tiger Cup Tournament.

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