Asher Wen

Strategist, Marketer, Nerd

Singtel pits Gordon Ramsay against Singaporean hawkers

Singtel pits Gordon Ramsay against Singaporean hawkers

UPDATE: Gordon Ramsay 1, Hawker Heroes 2. Ramsay hails Singaporean street food as being better than Michelin star restaurants. Watch what he says at the end of the post.

Gordon Ramsay is causing all sorts of buzz in Singaporean hawker centres this weekend. Invited by Singtel, Ramsay will face off three top hawkers who were voted in by Singaporeans in a bid to find out if the local hawker fare is really as good as Singaporeans make it out to be once and for all.

Ramsay’s fame as a Michelin-starred chef, the head chef in Hell’s Kitchen, and the host of various TV shows showing cuisines from different countries makes him an ideal fit for this challenge.

In preparation for his challenge, Gordon Ramsay has been going to different hawker centres to learn dishes from the hawkers, having appeared at famous food hangouts such as 328 Katong Laksa and Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice in Maxwell Road Food Centre. He will also be making an appearance in Newton Food Centre on Sunday, 7 July.

Is Singaporean Hawker Food Dying Out?

The challenge comes at a time when many locals are worried that the hawker culture in Singapore is dying out.

There has been various high-profile retirements of favourite hawker haunts lately such as Lim Seng Lee Duck Rice in South Buona Vista. With ageing hawkers literally growing old and dying out, and the younger generation eschewing the tough hawker life for cushy PMEB jobs, it seems to be only a matter of time before the hawker centres that litter Singapore is no more.

The Singtel challenge then, comes at an appropriate time to pull at the heartstrings of locals. If it isn’t a statement that our hawker food still reigns supreme, it is at least a brilliant eulogy that hawker food died out having once pitted itself against one of the best chefs in the world.

Singtel?

And how does all this link back to the largest telco player in Singapore?

After its acquisition of HungryGoWhere.com last May, Singtel now lays claim to the largest food & lifestyle audience in Singapore.

According to SGEntrepreneurs’s interview with Singtel’s Digital Life Group CEO, Allen Lew last year, “a cornerstone of SingTel’s growth strategy is to build digital solutions that help consumers in their daily lives – as they live, work and play. Possessing the local knowledge and content is critical as it allows us to compete effectively in these areas”.

It is evident that Singtel is increasingly its efforts to move the brand away from Telco-only, to a wider set of associations such as food and lifestyle. The Ramsay challenge helps in channeling traffic back to HungryGoWhere.com where the voting is held, and also helps to boost Singtel’s profile of being truly “local” and close to the ground as a content provider, rather than simply being a medium like Starhub.

Here’s more Ramsay:

At the end of the day, Ramsay lost to the Hawker Heroes by quite a close margin.  Not a totally unexpected result, since the odds are stacked against his favour.  Ramsay had nothing but the highest praise for Singaporean hawker food:

Oreo: The brand that chases the news

How is everyone this lovely Friday?  It’s been a busy week for this author, and hence quite quiet here at MAJOR: MARKETING.

I thought I would post some stuff that has fascinated me on social media, just for your entertainment. And I guess one brand sums up everything pretty well…

Oreo!

Oreo has been doing a marvelous job of staying hyper-relevant and on trend to all that happens over social media.

What I found really amazing was that they run a GLOBAL Facebook page rather than a local one! Doesn’t that make it doubly hard to stay relevant? And yet I think they are doing great, at least on the Singapore front.

If you are not from Singapore, here’s what they did:

Hello Kitty
Hello Kitty

A Hello Kitty fever is hitting Singapore. Long queues line up outside of local McDonald’s outlets where girls wait for their favourite cat, brothers queue for their sisters, and boyfriends wait in line for their girlfriends. The fever is so hot, in fact, that eBay is currently selling these feline soft toys at astronomical prices. Oreo has entered the fray quickly with “Hello, Cookie”.

Hail
Hail Oreo

Just after the haze hit, there were reports of a hailstorm in Singapore. Normally unheard of in our sunny little tropical island. The rare weather event naturally fascinated most Singaporeans.

Being the self-deprecating lot we are, a viral video has been spun out of an interview with a local who commented that the hail stones looked like grapes…

Of course, Oreo did not miss out on the opportunity either, and came up with “Hail, Oreo!” mere hours after the news and videos of the hail came online.

(On a side note, I totally love this video. It’s so awesome that it’s playing on loop on my computer right now! Hilarious.)

Haze
Haze

By now, the whole world knows that we had the haze that hit PSI 401 last Friday. I also featured it in a previous post about companies who jumped on the haze bandwagon to promote their brand and products.

Superdad
Superman + Father’s Day

Then there was Man of Steel that happened close to Father’s Day. Oreo killed two birds with one stone by celebrating “Super Dads”.

This has to be one of the most on-trend brands ever, further perfecting the real-time marketing they pioneered at Superbowl. Staying on top of the news has kept Oreo at the top of mind of consumers. The humour that comes with these posts also help to create a fun personality for the cookies. Brilliant, really. Looking forward to see more from Oreo!

Coherence.

I recently agreed to facilitate meetings for the Photography Club in my residential college in University.  At the end of our first session with the artist-in-residence, Samantha Tio, I asked for advice on how to make my photographs look coherent; like they belong to the same narrative.  Her reply was simple: “Use the same equipment”.

This is exactly the same way we achieve a consistent brand image and brand voice.

By using the same design elements such as fonts and colours, different parts of an organization can be tied together to present a unified image to the world.

One immediate example I can think of is that of my University’s branding.  Simple elements such as the corporate colours of blue and orange, together with the corporate font, Frutiger, makes anything instantly recognizable as part of the National University of Singapore.

NUS Open Day 2013
NUS Open Day 2013. Image Credit: NUS.

Take the recent NUS Open Day.  16 faculties and schools with separate visions and missions are tied together with only those elements to form a larger corporate body.  A visitor who goes down for Open Day would not notice anything jarring because various groups are synchronised through the brand elements.

That’s why most branding agencies would propose only one primary font and one secondary font, together with limited brand colours.  This also means that the more unique your brand colours (Tiffany & Co.) and fonts (Saks Fifth Avenue) are, the more you are able to stick out in the minds of your customers.  Of course, these elements would also have to be coherent with your business and the image you want to portray.

If you are tempted to vary your fonts and colours, be it for variety or for catching the attention of your customers, DON’T.  You will be doing your brand more harm than good.

Pope gives up red shoes.

Red Papal Shoes (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Pope Benedict XVI will hang up his signature red shoes, and enter into quiet prayer and meditation behind the Vatican walls as “Pope Emeritus”.  It is a new position created just for this moment, once-in-900-years resignation.

What struck me about this piece of news as it broke was how a simple pair of red shoes became such an integral part of the brand of the Pope.  The tradition of wearing red shoes supposedly harked from the times when popes wore robes and shoes fitting the liturgical colors.  From then on, red shoes stuck on with the official dress and brand of the Papacy.  Only the Pope can stir up so much attention with just his choice of shoes!  This shows how potent a symbol of the Papacy the shoes are.  Strong brands would often have distinctive characteristics and signs that are unique to them and stand out in the minds of consumers just like what we see here.

The current Pope restored the use of red papal shoes even though his predecessor Pope John Paul II opted for brown shoes.  The Pope’s red shoes are specially made by his personal cobbler, Antonio Arellano from Gammarelli in Santa Chiara’s District, Rome.  After his resignation, the Pope will keep his white cassock but would have to give up his red papal shoes.  The Pope would be wearing brown loafers that were given to him by artisans from Mexico after his resignation.

Read more about the pope’s shoes at The Atlantic Wire!