What is in a Brand?
When you are driving into a highway service area and looking to drink a coffee, do you take time to evaluate the many businesses offering coffee, or simply head to the nearest coffee shop? Or, as most of us do, go towards the shop showing the brand most familiar to you? You don’t know that the product being offered by this particular outlet is of the same quality as you have tasted previously, or even whether the quality is to the standards of the company which owns the outlet. You just trust the brand that you are familiar with.
This behaviour is typical of us all, once we commit to a brand we tend to follow that commitment, be the product cosmetics, cars, mobile phones, even clothing and fashion. Branding is for most people an important issue. The brand gives look and “feel” to the product, and even what it stands for. Also, it gives the owner an ego boost in that he or she has made a value decision. The brand confirms these emotions by endorsements from, for instance a famous footballer or rock star who “apparently” also uses the same product.
In many ways this thinking is flawed. Not because in principle, there is anything wrong with the product, but because the companies trade on an image. For instance a perfume with a French brand name may well be produced in a factory in Poland. Or that American brand sports shoe might be manufactured in Taiwan. Once again, nothing wrong in principle. It’s just that you are not getting what you perceive you are buying.
With large equipment, like sugar cane harvesters, life is slightly different because customers invariably evaluate the product, even try the product prior to purchase. But that does not mean that they are not influenced by brand, and of course, there remains in the Asian sugar industry, a perception that western brands must be best. Interesting, because, certainly in Europe sugar cane is not harvested, in fact, it does not grow. So, once again, do you know really what you are getting when selecting one of these brands? Are, for instance the engineers who design these machines familiar with Asian conditions? Or even what sugar cane looks like? Is that American brand actually American or European? Are these quality products? Are the sub components reliable? Should you even trust the brand? We don’t know, we cannot say by looking and there is little opportunity to research. But theirs is a recognised brand, and that is why customers consider them.
For Samart Kaset Yon ltd the brand “Samart” has been an evolution. The company started over 40 years ago as SMKY with no other mission than to provide affordable, effective tools to help the Thai farmer make his living. The emphasis was always on quality, that is, quality defined by what the machine could do, rather than whether it was a thing of beauty, or painted a specific “corporate” colour. For Samart, the first mass produced product was a range of hydraulic cane lift attachments. Still in production today, they were sold throughout Asia, and painted green, in what was to become Samart’s corporate colour. Green continued with Samart products as the demand spread out from Thailand and became recognisable throughout the industry. When the demands moved to harvesters there was definitely a shift in the company approach to the brand. But even then, the original colour scheme was echoed in the livery of the cane harvesters, with yellow added latterly to enhance the general aesthetics, and a simple factual Samart logo on the cutting head. Understated, simple, but effective. Like the product.
At Samart, we have never professed to be anything other than what we are. As long as we can be recognised as an efficient, quality supplier our branding has been effective. We are Samart, a medium sized engineering company located in the agricultural heartland of Thailand, one of the World’s top sugar producing countries. We build harvesters and other cane handling equipment. Our pedigree is a life in sugar cane. Our product is quality assured at production level in our dedicated manufacturing facility in the Hankha district of Chainat. All of our designs are developed by engineers and technicians who have grown up with sugar cane and understand, not only the product, but the people who will use it. And more importantly, the conditions in which they will operate. We source our key elements from western companies so we “build in” the reliability that other brands emphasise, and our test regimes are carried out in field conditions to ensure the machines endure real application before our end customers see them.
We build specialist machines with unique features which help cope with Asian farming conditions and afford our customers the possibility to economically cut areas of cane which cannot be accessed by conventional harvesters. Our aim is to make any cane field profitable. With a wide and flexible range of equipment and reliable service-ability, our brand supports our customers in every way. We recognise that there are choices in our markets, and Samart may not be a brand that you have heard of. But our brand now supports many, many thousands of workers, owners and their businesses by providing cost effective, productive machinery which simply makes sense. So, if you don’t know us, maybe you should get to know us. The Samart capability, it’s what you deserve.
