Four marketing professionals received the Distinguished Marketing Leadership awards in recognition of their innovative approaches to product and service promotion.
Diane Chiu, marketing director of Dairy Farm, was named CIM Marketer of The Year. The award was sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The other recipients were: Betty Leong Sin-ling, general manager of investment property at the MTRC; Clare Ho, director of mobile marketing, consumer group, PCCW; and Lena Tsang, vice-president of Sir Hudson International.
Chiu of Dairy Farm oversaw supermarket chain Wellcome's 'One Dollar Does Matter' campaign launched early last year. 'One of the main objectives of the campaign is to differentiate our low price positioning and build brand preference by creating an emotional connection between Wellcome and our customers,' she said. 'Apart from helping customers save money, the campaign espouses the idea of cherishing, which is a virtue of Chinese culture.'
Advocating cherishing the quality time one spends with family, the campaign featured a little girl who wanted to use her savings to buy more quality time with her busy father. 'We used the campaign to challenge the status quo of low-price-focused promotion because it transformed product-selling to emotional branding,' Chiu said.
Sir Hudson's Tsang developed a campaign to relaunch Habitu Ristorante at Lee Gardens in Causeway Bay and achieved much publicity through interactive and creative culinary events and built a relationship with its customers, food critics and business partners. 'The campaign was strategically done in stages. We held a series of interactive and educational Italian wine pairing dinner parties and invited guest chefs from Florence to bring a memorable culinary experience to our customers in Hong Kong,' she added.
The Hong Kong mobile phone market is extremely competitive - it has a market penetration rate of over 160 per cent. PCCW rolled out its 'Passion Is Power' campaign in 2007 to shift consumers' focus on to the 3G services provided through its mobile offer to the market instead of price competition, Ho said. 'Leveraging on the powerful quadruple play platforms of PCCW, we took the initiatives to tap into and lead the mobile infotainment market. We maximised this competitive edge to differentiate our brand from competitors which gave rise to our 'The Strongest Mobile Infotainment Platform' brand proposition.