IT IS not difficult for me to agree with the report that the shoe industry of Carcar is dying. However, I must disagree that cheap Chinese imports are the cause of its slow demise.
Speaking from my thirty years of marketing experience, what is killing Carcar’s shoe industry is the absence of a brand. It limps along on just one leg, marketing. Cheap Chinese imports would not have been a problem if Carcar had the other leg, branding.
Marketing is actively pushing a product or service to a targeted customer-group.
Marketing is essentially tactical and can be done successfully for any product regardless of quality but only in the short term.
However, to market a product for long term success like steady growth, one needs branding and by that I don’t just mean labeling. If marketing is the pushing of a product, branding is the pulling of targeted customers to your product or service because of a defining value customers get from it for their money.
The brand is what makes target customers loyal because it embodies everything they need from your product. Hence, branding is simply the serious and systematic effort to consistently put in the product or service what one has decided should be its essential overriding value, and, therefore, main selling feature or features over the long term to a specified group of customers.
Look how successful Kenneth Cobonpue’s brand is in the world furniture market because of his signature designs for natural fibers and materials or Guimaras mangoes in the fruit market because of their consistently sweet and disease-free quality. Look at how successful franchising is. Because a franchise sells a specific brand one franchise’s product is clearly different from another’s and is bought by customers for its differentiating feature.
Carcar shoes, by contrast, have no reputation for anything. You cannot tell people to buy them because they have this overriding special quality that makes them worth their price. They are just “puede na” shoes for the “puede na” market. That’s why it is losing to cheaper “puede na” Chinese imports.
Carcar shoemakers must make up their minds. If they decide to compete in the price-sensitive “puede na” market then, to survive, they have no choice but to sell their shoes cheaper than Chinese imports. If they want a higher price, they must get out of the “puede na” market and develop a brand, a defining value, that would make more discriminating customers pay a premium for their products.
The first condition for success in business is a product or service with essential features that delight a specified customer group. That is branding and that, more than anything, is what Carcar’s shoe industry needs for long term success.