Asiaone 1-42

MARKETING AND BRANDING STRATEGY
BUSINESS
Our marketing objective is to build our brand names. Brand building increases the public’s awareness
of our image and service offerings. As more websites, products and services proliferate across the
Internet, it is necessary for us to build a strong foundation for our brands. Products and services can
be copied but good brands are difficult to replicate. We plan to invest long term in brand building
through quality advertising. We intend to spend approximately $15 million for these marketing
campaigns.
In the launch phase, we have invested in advertising in the traditional mass media like press, television
and radio in Singapore. In the second phase, we will expand our advertising into regional markets
like Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and China.
To increase the level of awareness and top-of-mind recall of our websites as well as to attract new
users, we will continue to engage in a series of marketing campaigns via the traditional mass media
as well as through co-branding ventures with other successful brands. Co-branding of websites enable
users to fully enjoy the information and services offered by both partners and enhances the total
customer experience online. Co-branding also offers additional revenue streams such as advertising
and joint sponsorships.
Besides brand building, our marketing thrust also includes loyalty programmes to retain customers.
These programmes will be used to reward regular customers as well as to attract customers to visit
our websites more often. Prizes, contests, rewards and games will be introduced in an exciting way.
To further build and maintain users’ loyalty, we plan to do the following:-
(i) invest in new technology to build comprehensive websites to support mass transaction capabilities
and website functionality to provide portal services which users find easy to use and will want
to continue using;
(ii) increase the depth of our existing channels;
(iii) introduce new channels on specific topic areas;
(iv) introduce new products and services at our websites;
(v) augment the range of product offerings at our e-commerce websites; and
(vi) continue to provide free personalised services.
In order to achieve an enriching total customer experience, it is crucial to have an integrated portal
strategy. We adopt a holistic approach to communications, branding and services. This enables
customers to have a unified look and feel of the service offerings and can have convenient links to
relevant services. An integrated marketing strategy for our portal sites enables us to cross sell and
upsell our services to the users.
We employ a software called NetGravity to track the readership at our websites. With this database,
we are able to profile our registered users to better enable us to cater to our users’ needs and
interests and to render personalised value-added services to them. We may, for example, introduce
our users to channels at our websites which they are less familiar with and to the product offerings
which they may not be aware of. For example, when a user buys a car through our classified
website, he will be introduced to our e-finance portal where the user may find car loan packages
and motor insurance policies. The aim is to position our portal as a “one-stop” destination site.
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