BUSINESSES in Brunei have to go "beyond pricing", if they want to succeed in selling their products and services.

This was the mindset that Brenda Bence, president of Brand Development Associated International Ltd (BDA) said last week at the Asia Inc Forum's workshop, held at the Brunei Hotel, for local businesses on branding.

The international branding guru said that one of the challenges highlighted during the workshop was the challenges surrounding pricing.

"I am trying to dispel the notion that when someone makes a decision, they make a decision on price alone; they only make a decision on price, when that's all they see," said Bence. She added that when a company decides to brand themselves, they have to "go beyond price", and differentiate themselves from the competition.

"We want to talk about value, and it is the difference between performance and price, and if you've got truly good performance that is different from the competition, then people are going to be willing to pay a higher price," said Bence.

Bence is also an author of the personal branding book, How YOU are like Shampoo and an international branding expert and certified executive coach. Graduating from Harvard Business School, she managed mega brands for Procter & Gamble and Bristol-Myers Squibb across four continents and 50 countries. Her advice to local businesses was to find a way to be beyond pricing and in order to get the products or services into the hands of the customer.

She said that based on her observation at the workshop, she found there to be a good mix of businesses ranging from products to services, business-to-business to business-to-consumer, and that a lot of the businesses have the potential to go beyond the challenges highlighted at the workshop.

"Firstly, there is a lot of good and strong talent in this country and I'm very impressed with the thinking, the mindset, the ability to be open and rethinking their brands, and I also think that there is high quality here," she said adding that she finds that the businesses here have a "real desire to do it right".

Some of the common mistakes that Bence said Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) make in general is that many of them tend to brand their business around what they want out of the business, instead of what the customer wants. "The workshop today dived deep into finding out what a client really is, who is a real client, these are fundamentals to success," she said.

The second mistake most SMEs tend to make is with the company's brand name, and she noticed that one of the common mistakes is to get a little "too creative".

Bence noted that when a business is small, there isn't a lot of funds left for businesses to spend on communication, and so SMEs need to keep their names simple, that is able to communicate what the company itself does.

Another common mistake that Bence said she's noticed in her years of experience is that there are a lot of companies that don't spend enough time doing market research, and understanding the need that is in the market.

"If you are just competing on price, then it's not a brand, it's a commodity, and you don't want to be in that market because someone will always beat your price," she said. She added that one way of being different is to identify a need in the market that no one else is meeting, that an individual company can do better than the competition.

"Let me give you a startling statistic; there was a research that was going on that said that the average person living in a city runs across 3,000 brands every single day, and you have got to find a way to stick out in the midst of those 3,000 brands," she said.

SMEs would need to stick out more than the multinationals, mainly because the multinationals have got "big bucks and deep pockets", so SMEs would have to find a way to be smarter, faster and more adept at "getting your brand across".

Bence said many SMEs tend to overlook marketing via word-of-mouth. "The funny thing about small businesses, is that strong businesses are created with a strong word of mouth, and it doesn't cost much at all," she said.

Bence said that all it takes are satisfied customers and asking people to share their service with five friends, and within a matter of months businesses are able to get a few hundred people.

"Think smarter, don't always rely on things like advertising; if you do need to advertise, social media is really cheap, but you have to be careful how you do that, and you have to stay true to your brand," she said.

She said that SMEs have to find a way to reach to their customers by being true to the brand.

"Be true to your brand, and where your customer can be reached most effectively, don't worry about being too creative, once you are true to your brand, and stand (up) for it, your brand will build itself and get satisfied customers," she said.The Brunei Times