TBWA HK offers service pack to help brands through "financial winter"

TBWA Hong Kong has launched Brave Bear Pack, which it calls a new product focusing on growth hacking and cost-efficient tools to help brands survive the "coming financial winter".

Observing that the trade war and unrest in Hong Kong have created trying conditions (to say the least), the agency said its aim with the new offering is to be more agile and cost-efficient while producing work that is more measurable and ultimately moves the needle on sales. The offering also includes a tie-up with Ketchum Hong Kong for crisis-management services.

The offering encompasses three essential areas in the user-conversion funnel, said Terence Ling, the agency's head of strategy: customer acquisition, cost-efficient and effective content and proactive reputation management.

Specificaly, the components of the offering, some new and some pre-existing, are: 

• Demand Mapping, described as a "live, data-informed sizing methodology" to identify "neglected white space and customer demand".
• Acquisition System Architecture, a lead-generation and conversion approach using dynamic content.
• Efficient Content Production, provided by the agency's in-house filmmaking unit, Bolt.
• Affordable Big Format Film Production, provided through TBWA's FlareStudio crowdsourcing platform.
• ChatBot Marketing, using Facebook and WeChat.
• Crisis Management, described as a mitigation planning and "pay-as-you-go" retained service, provided by TBWA and Ketchum Hong Kong.

"Brave Bear Pack is a purpose-cut process to connect the components that we find tremendously useful in this sort of challenging environment, and adding new components that are needed, including reputation management," Jan Cho, MD of TBWA Hong Kong, told Campaign Asia-Pacific. "Some of these product components are taken from the existing services of TBWA, in which we have evidence of success/track record to give clients the assurance that it works." 

Understanding of how upstream business planning (demand mapping), impacts acquisition strategies "avoids the scenario of only focussing on the big picture and ultimately falling short when it’s executed", Cho added.

Simeon Mellalieu, APAC partner for client development at Ketchum, said it's imperative for companies to ensure they’re in a position to manage their brands through times of uncertainty and risk. "The Brave Bear Pack is a smart solution, which allows businesses to safeguard their brands with confidence via our risk-assessment process, consumer-sentiment tracking, crisis response and brand-recovery strategies,” he added.

Cho expounded further on the importance of robust demand mapping. "We talk a lot about 'white space' in business planning, but how businesses locate this is usually based on a limited set of data," he said, adding that this in many cases relies on past data or models of similar products and services in a similar market conditions. "But this can be poorly informed given how fast the business environment and audience insights are being reshaped every day in a hyper-connected world," he said. "Demand Mapping is our proprietary way to size market opportunities."

It marries data of various sorts, including audience insights to inform everything from micro factors such as platform behaviours, search behaviours, browsing behaviours, or footfall in particular shops within a neighbourhood, all the way to macro factors such as cultural trends or political influence. "In a challenging business environment, we need to look beyond the game or even change the game, if we want to achieve exponential growth, not just incremental growth," Cho said.