The business landscape in Asia will change rapidly in the coming years, where the opportunities for Asian companies to benefit from building global brands will be larger than ever before. The growing emphasis on branding will move up the boardroom agenda and branding will become one of the most prominent drivers of value in Asia Pacific in the next two decades. Branding is being discussed almost daily in Asian media and in multiple conferences and seminars.
Branding is a boardroom agenda. The branding process cannot reach its logical conclusion unless the chairman and the CEO buy into it and back it up with the required resources. But merely having the branding knowledge will not suffice. Leaders need to have a holistic vision and an in-depth understanding of the discipline. One also has to be an excellent business leader and brand marketer with a truly international edge.
Fiji Water is one of the better examples which testify that competent branding can elevate even the simplest commodity to a celebrity status. In a category dominated by France’s Evian, Coca Cola’s Dasani and Pepsi Co’s Aquafina among many others, Fiji Water has come to occupy the third place within the short span of a decade.
By following non-traditional methods of marketing, a very distinct positioning, and a high end pricing, Fiji Water has been able to establish strong brand equity amongst the top tier market segment including celebrities, Hollywood stars and the best restaurants of world cities.
Fiji’s Background
Fiji Water, the company that owns the Fiji Water brand, was founded in 1988 in Basalt, Colorado by Gilmour, a businessman with interests in hotels, real estate and gold mining. The Fiji Water brand came into life in the early 1990s when David Gilmour secured a 99 year deal with the Fijian government to tap the aquifer discovered by government contracted geologists and market the water under the Fiji Water brand name. Fiji Water has extensively made use of product placements in leading Hollywood movies, high profile events and exclusive restaurants to include the brand in the elite community.
Branding Philosophy
As many in the bottled water category have commented, all water tastes the same. This means branding in this category is not product focused, but story focused. The company, which tells a better story and backs it up with credible facts, thereby creating an exciting myth, wins the day. Fiji Water seems to have understood this underlying truth extremely well. The Fiji Water brand is built on three pillars: creating an exciting myth, precision marketing (including personal relationships and product placements) and a controlled distribution strategy.
As the physical attributes of the product cannot be differentiated in itself, Fiji Water has resorted to creating a very powerful story around the product. Fiji is a 332-island nation in the South Pacific, very far from most markets and customers. This physical inaccessibility has provided Fiji Water to create the story of this water being extracted from a virgin ecosystem far from acid rain, herbicides, pesticides and other pollutants, and that is filtered naturally for years through layers of silica, basalt and sandstone, as is communicated through its packaging. This story provided customers with something unique to sit up and take notice of. The story was backed by the credible fact, that Fiji is an unexploited land full of tropical forest surrounded by coral reefs, unpolluted by the modern world’s necessary evils and was protected by nature as it were. This created a very strong myth about the brand amongst the customers, which in turn built the brand.
The myth creation was backed by precision brand marketing. Fiji Water did not resort to the usual mass media advertising for its product launch. It formulated a two-pronged strategy:
- Building personal relationships with the chefs of leading restaurants, resorts and spas to promote the buy-in of the brand
- Placing the product in leading Hollywood movies and other high-profile events to attract attention and to create buzz.
Gilmour used his contacts in the hotel industry to pitch his product to the top-end hotels, resorts and restaurants. By coming out with an award-winning slippery silver bottle design, Fiji water has been able to replace Evian in many of the top-end restaurants.
Fiji Water has resorted to product placement as a major channel of promotion and brand building. By hiring Creative Entertainment Services, a Hollywood marketing consulting firm, Fiji has been able to fit in Fiji Water bottles in scripts of many major Hollywood movies. These exposures to the brand, when combined with the exciting mythical story, have made the brand noticeable. Fiji Water has also sponsored many local events such as golf tournaments, sailing regattas, and musical events.
Another important aspect of Fiji Water’s branding philosophy has been its controlled distribution strategy. In line with its positioning of a high-end product, Fiji Water has ensured that it is available at the best hotels, resorts and spas used by the leading stars and managed to get chef’s recommendations. As is generally known, the bottled water category is notorious for its difficulty in making money. Fiji Water offers distributors as well as retailers the opportunity to make profits in a category that they had become used to not making any money in. Bottled water can be very difficult to make money in if one is selling a commodity product.
By its unique positioning and pricing strategies, Fiji Water has been able to make money and help its distributors make money. Although Fiji Water’s bottles were off the shelves due to their inability to match up the huge demand initially, this has added to its feel of exclusivity. This controlled distribution has helped Fiji Water to be at the right places at the right time, thereby helping in brand building.
Future Challenges
Evian pioneered the idea in the bottled water category of elevating a commodity to a brand status. Looking back, Evian did things as that Fiji Water is doing now. Fiji Water has been quite successful with its marketing, story telling and distribution strategies till now.
The biggest challenge for Fiji Water going ahead would be to sustain this level of interest in its brand. The problem of basing the brand heavily on such a myth is that it does not create any barriers for any new entrants to come up with some other equally exciting myth. Given the low level of involvement of customers in selecting water, customers would be willing to try out newer and more exciting brands as and when they come up. In this regard, Fiji Water should focus on formulating a strong customer loyalty and retention drive in the light of impending competition.
Though Fiji Water has managed to get Forbes include it in a list of things “worth every penny”, it would indeed require much more than a strong story to carry it through in the future.
