Is been said that companies need be 'consistently inconsistent' to win in Asia. Based on Grey Global Group's latest Eye on Asia research, Chris Beaumont, the company's chief strategy officer/Asia Pacific, identified five key factors that are essential for creating and building brands that connect with the region's consumers. Together they work in tandem to increase marketing ROI for business.

1. Value(s) Creation: Brands are moving quickly from a focus on functional excellence and style to a focus on more culturally relevant meanings. New brand ideas will emerge increasingly from the cultures of Asia, in fact, possibly more so than from any corner of the world, to shape the dynamic Global Culture within which we all participate. We are all in the business of creating cultural brands.

At another level, every branded product and service provides a perceived value. Too often, the word value means cheap. It should mean satisfaction. Marketing value should not be synonymous with price promotions. But marketing will have to be more skillful to produce better results from slimmer margins and budgets.

2. InfoLust: By enabling unparalleled access to information, technology is already changing consumer expectations, bringing more transparency and accountability to society. In the era of choice, there is lust to know the best price, the quickest card, the healthiest option ?immediately. "How do I make the right decision?" The power that marketing departments typically had in terms of being able to manage customer expectations will disappear. Marketers need to feed the thirst for knowledge and to use information wisely.

Information, knowledge and communication are the very heart and sinew of the newly emerging post-industrial societies of Asia. The focus of all such societies is always on those areas and activities which produce new wealth. Here, the idea is king. In this sense, we can hypothesise that, with web 2.0 communities, we will see innovation overload as the natural extension of information overload.

3. Being Brand: Successful brands must be based on a point of view their owners care about deeply and be backed by the delivery of a powerful product experience. The marketing imperative is to understand and improve the consumer to product connection. Brands which focus on this connection, like Apple, see the consumer experience at the centre of their innovation process and are leaders as a result.

4. Operational Efficiency and Innovation: As a first step for meaningful innovation, brand building needs to be recognised as a key success factor in both business strategy and operational excellence. To win this recognition, marketers need to accept the increasing use of metrics and ROI focus for marketing initiatives; to quote John Quelch at Harvard, " Today's boards want CMO's who can speak the language of productivity and ROI and are willing to be held accountable. Today's boards don't need CMO's who have creative flair but no financial discipline. They need ambidextrous marketers who offer both."

Consumer research and dialogue has only one critical objective: to improve marketing decisions. In Asia's new commercial environment, marketing will, through technology, move more toward being a science. However, as in music, modern technology gives the composer a greater degree of control and allows creativity to flourish. Successful marketers will need to utilise consumer research to uncover the art in science.

5. Segmentation: While we consider massclusivity, so we need to think of the 'long tail'; there are riches in those niches. We also need to think in a different manner about how people communicate and absorb messages; communications architecture will become more important for all brands as we better understand the interplay between the type of content that is appropriate for the specific context or medium that's being used.

The nature of the communications model has moved on. It's not about the 'new media' but rather how to employ new marketing principles recognising that the old marketing communications paradigm of interruption will no longer suffice. Marketers must think differently about the ''F''-word: Fragmentation.

Two Australian companies, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, are in the process of making bids around the US $40Billion mark for Alcoa according to this story.

In the flat world of a global economy what changes? Well it would put a lot of focus on the Australian Stock Exchange globally, and would see Australia's economy being even more centred around resources....

Interesting story in MSN Mondey about the troubles at Dell with the CEO going, a shareholder lawsuit etc...

But what I found most interesting in this story was the conclusion about Vista:

I try to visit Seth Godin't page regularly to see what new customer service or corporate problem he has uncovered....

This piece about the Sheepwalkers amongst us hit home for me. Sounded awfully like a company that I did work for recently (and a few more that I have seen over the years!)... Those from that company who still read this blog will surely recognize the symptoms....

It is pretty easy, really. We just have to remember that it is all about the customer. The problem is that some of us think that our boss is the customer. Just running around pleasing the boss may give you a sun-tanned nose, but it doesn't help if your boss is misguided or just plain dumb. The customer is always the person who stands at the end of the whole line and pays hard cash for the service, the widget, the product... If he or she stop paying the gravy train ends. There are a lot of companies that continue (fortunately for their shareholders) to sit under a waterfall of revenue that is a legacy from the smart energetic people that went before.

But that waterfall of previous revenues is no guarantee of revenues to come. Unless you get very relevant and important and positively viewed to that end user, end customer who sits at the end of the chain.

Think about Steve Jobs now... presenting the iPod and the iMac....

And now look at history.

Steve Jobs 22 years ago launching the first iteration of the Mac. Brilliant performance art from a true master.