...Or even the next Acer.

While Taiwan's Acer has snapped up a few downward-spiral western brands on its march to the PC global top three, colleagues over at ASUS have looked on with envy. So a while back, these ASUS fellows launched a cheap, light and functional Netbook, the "Eee". What has happened in the ensuing months is unfortunately a typical Taiwan business story.

Seen from the inside (as I have with many of the leading Asian companies), even the most sophisticated local companies are run in seat-of-the-pants fashion. There is no REAL overarching corporate strategy or mission. What these guys tend to do, and what most companies with an OEM/ODM background thrive on, is lurch from trend to trend, strategy to strategy, trying to rack up short-term gains, however possible.

So the Eee was a minor global hit with the budget-conscious and started to get a bit of brand recognition out there. What next? Never the strategic thinkers, the company did what any Taiwan firm would do--flood the market with brand and line extensions: A hundred flavors of the same Eee Netbook, brand extensions into completely unrelated areas. You know the drill and you can imagine management's thinking: "Hey, someone has heard of our company. Let's give them a hundred new and unrelated products to annoy the crap out of them."

Local business guys here in Taiwan are never subtle. Witness their approach to advertising: Carpet bomb you into hiding under the covers (e.g. the local McDonald's franchise often runs the same ads two or three times during a SINGLE commercial break on local TV).

So what unfocused steps is ASUS now taking?

Before being even remotely established as a credible company with anything REAL to offer aside from a budget Netbook, they are clumsily trying to build a "brand". The CEO is interviewed saying it's important to build a brand (as if saying so will make it so). It hosts awkward "international media events" where the company flies journalists from backwater third-tier countries in for "fashion shows" of the same Eee laptop, now with a bamboo cover(!).

I, and many supertech marketing veterans, have seen all this before. These are the typical, feeble "brand-building" attempts of the companies that are not ready for it. The main reason for Asus is that it is still very much a LOCAL company. I've said it before. A typical trait among many Asian companies is "talk global, act local", meaning that their ambitions to be world-beaters are defeated by the inability/unwillingness to change their Confucian, traditional corporate culture.

ASUS is no different from most in this regard. Sure, they have an Italian as their "design director", but no other outside adviser with any sort of influence. Their leadership is all very local with a local mindset, not like the foreign-educated Korean type that Samsung brought in when it wanted to start revolutionizing its corporate culture. And that's an important point: It took Samsung and others many years to become powerful global brands. And many of those early years were spent reforming the company from within and building a strong focus on a corporate mission and strategy. They didn't waste a lot of time on chasing feeble trends.

More to come.
--jag

 

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