In April 2009,
Uniqlo, a Japanese casual wear retail chain opened its first store in Singapore
as part of a franchise owned by Wing Tai Holdings and continue to expands to a
total of 5 retail stores. Uniqlo debuted in Singapore with an
integrated marketing campaign, “ Uniqlo surprises Singapore” to raise brand
awareness and engage its target consumers through the infusion of Japanese
culture in various touch points.
Large mural walls of Uniqlo
were seen at various train stations, as well as online advertising website that
brought the brand’s culture from Tokyo to Singapore.
Uniqlo
Surprise
Uniqlo
brought in the iconic “gacha gacha” vending machine online to dispense various
Uniqlo surprises (vouchers, ringtones, wallpapers) daily to the users who
visited that website. The brand successfully captured its target audiences and
data collected through the web became a strong consumer database for Uniqlo
Singapore. The brand also made strategic collaborations for T-shirt designs
with brands, such as anime one-piece, Cath Kidston, Disney, which were
well-like by their target group.
Uniqlo Singapore has been leveraging
social media platform such as facebook to continuously engage its target group
with product updates, competitions and prizes to create buzz as well as brand
loyalty.
Recently, Uniqlo goes local globally
and appointed local celebrities, such as Rebecca Lim and Pierre Png in
Singapore to endorse its product to have a direct appeal to each country’s
demographics and consumer reference.
References:
From the comparison above between Denizen and Uniqlo in terms of their 4 Ps (product, price, place and promotion), Uniqlo
seems to be performing better than Denizen in many areas.
In
terms
of product, both Denizen and Uniqlo strives to provide good quality apparels
to their customers. However, Denizen is lacking in variety in terms of product
offerings and style of the jeans. Uniqlo is able to constantly push out new
products and remain updated in terms of the designs of their t-shirts. In view
of this, both Denizen and Uniqlo were able to make their apparels
affordable to their customers. Yet, from our survey conducted previously, Uniqlo was
perceived as more value-for-money as compared to Denizen. Both of their store
outlets are equally distributed between the town and heartland areas with
Denizen having more than twice the number of outlets than Uniqlo.
Denizen took on a quick penetration as they took over the Levi’s Signature
stores. Nonetheless, Uniqlo’s
strategic penetration plan with ideal store location in malls, enabled them to
be more prominent and viewed more favorable. Lastly, considering their
promotions, Uniqlo has
a more integrated marketing promotion as they constantly engage their customers
through several platforms with localised and appealing content. On the other
hand, Denizen’s marketing promotions seems more disconnected as there was
little attempt to sustain the interest of the customers in Denizen.
In
conclusion,
Uniqlo has
a overall more consistent and focused brand campaign by first building
awareness, then communicating their brand image and performance, next to work
on judgment and feelings and finally to obtain resonance (I.e. through CBBE)
There was an effort to constantly innovate and renovate to remain relevant to
the customers. Conversely, Denizen
infiltrated the market quickly but lack the marketing efforts to sustain
salience and work on building positive brand image and feelings. In the end,
they were placing too much emphasis on using price promotions to entice
customers to patronise
their store instead on building a relationship with them. The lack of
communication (with the not integrated marketing platforms) further widens the
gap.
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