“I think that if investments in a brand are higher the economy will grow. If you emphasize branding, it means you don’t cheat business partners, you invest in a lot of things, you do things more reliably, with a greater coordination,” said Stefan Liute, strategy director with branding agency Storience, at a conference on how Romanian entrepreneurs should grow through branding organized by Ziarul Financiar on Thursday.
An effective branding campaign does not come cheap, it may cost as much as several million euros, but a business needs it in order to grow, says lawyer Remus Borza, chairman of private healthcare group Polisano and court-appointed trustee of Romania’s largest energy generation company Hidroelectrica.
“The market context does not matter. Whoever does not communicate, forgets to do marketing, invest in the company and product brand, makes the worst mistake,” said Liviu Stoleru, general manager and chairman of the board of directors of construction materials manufacturer Cemacon.
“We’ve been going through a crisis on the construction materials market since 2008 but Cemacon has been posting 20% growth every year, we’ve eaten others’ market share.”
Cemacon has an over 40-year history and posted more than EUR10 million revenue in 2013.
Cemacon started a rebranding process alongside its restructuring four years ago, at the end of which it launched a new product range, Evoceramic, which drove its sales up 20%.
“We innovated a full product portfolio at the time, we introduced five new types of bricks and invested several hundred thousand euros in an honest rebranding process to improve the market’s confidence in our products. You don’t have to be a multinational to devise a good branding strategy, all you need is a team of creative executives with a vision, who have a 5-10 year business development direction,” Stoleru explained.
Storience’s Stefan Liute, too, says investments in a brand, however high they might be, are worth nothing if the product or service a company sells is not good or the company does not know how to get close to consumers. Which is why entrepreneurs have to be sufficiently motivated to keep going as much as ten to twenty years even until their product or service becomes a brand.
ZF started the ‘Romania 5%’ project asking Romania’s business class – entrepreneurs and private companies, to create a platform to help relaunch the country’s economy.
“For Romanian businesses to grow through branding, they need to adjust to the market, invest in promotion and stress on the advantages of their products,” said Simona Cocos, general manager of drug producer Zentiva, which owns the former Sicomed plant, at the ZF conference organized in partnership with Cemacon, Hidroelectrica, Polisano, Zentiva – a Sanofi company, CEC Bank, Albalact and Flanco.
Lawyer Remus Borza says there are some brands on the Romanian market that everyone knows: Dorna, Borsec, Dacia and Plafar.
The local brands that have managed to stay on the market – some of them in the ‘major league’ even, include Flanco, Algocalmin, Albalact, Musette, CEC Bank and Polisano. Some of them have been around for decades, some for over a century.
“In our twenty years in business we’ve had a pretty rough ride. We were the first computer and electronics retail chain established in 1994. We are the only ones in the industry that have the experience of going public in 2007 and the only ones to have gone through insolvency,” said Dragos Sirbu, chief executive officer of Flanco Retail, one of the leading local computer and electronics retailers.
“Flanco is where it wants to be now. We seek to be a financially sound company, with moderate growth, which wants to send the message that it has learnt from its history. The future is up to us now, to how we build it.”
In turn, Simona Cocos, the general manager of Zentiva, whose brands include Algocalmin and Antinevralgic, says that ‘made in Romania’ has become a competitive edge in pharmacies, a trend that started a few years ago.
“Traditional Zentiva brands won the battle with multinationals with their effectiveness, affordability, because the average Zentiva product price is half the price of a generic and also through the investments the company has been making and adjustment to technological advances,” she explained.
“Our winning card was the investment in new brands and how we managed to communicate through them with our customers, whether it was Zuzu or Fulga. The advantage was that when it comes to foods, local producers know how to get close to consumers, hence Romanians are attracted to local brands,” said Celina Condorovici, senior brand manager with Albalact, one of the leading dairy companies on the Romanian market.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)