The Danger of Market Research

Most of the new brands being launched today are created to serve an existing market leader rather than to create new markets. That is why you get so many me-too products out  there in the market place today.

li9ht Brand Communications is not against market research. In fact, we do a lot of market research in the course of our work but market research alone will not help you create the next big brand. Market research can only tell you the size of an existing market and what customers have bought (or not bought). It cannot help you to create a new market. If you cannot create a new market for your brand, your brand cannot grow. 

The reason is very simple. If you launch a brand that is designed to serve an existing market, that market will already have been dominated by some big players and a lot of smaller ones. It is tough launching a brand into a market that already has so many battle-hardened competitors.(y)

Unfolding the Truth About Beer

Beer is the best damn drink in the world, yet not everybody what it is. Some of us at li9ht Brand Communications had ever drink a pint, but all of us didn’t even know what beer really was when PT Multi Bintang Indonesia Tbk. (MBI), the producer of Bir Bintang, Heineken, Bintang Zero, Green Sands and Recharge presented us the opportunity to get a hand at their beer products by conceiving and designing a distinctive booklet that unfolded the truth about beer. The booklet will be handed over to people coming to MBI’s breweries for a so-called “brewery visit”.

After hours of intense brainstormings among ourselves and with the client and one time brewery visit to the company’s one of two plants in Tangerang (the other being in Mojokerto, East Java), li9ht’s creative team came up with an out-of-the-box booklet design concept that represented the MBI’s spirit—enjoyment. The content discloses facts about beer that we assumed most people don’t know about. The booklet takes the form of a big glass tankard full of beer and foam with the Heineken and Bir Bintang logos on the body of the glasses. This is to tell the audience what to find “what is inside a glass of beer”.

CLIENT: PT Multi Bintang Indonesia Tbk.

PROJECT: Beer Booklet

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

A Dashboard Pad to Hold Two Tires

Bridgestone tires’ users are car owners, and car owners love to display functional trinkets all around the inside of their cars. That was why Bridgestone promoted a rubber dashboard pad that can hold coins, a cellphone, or any other small items that are easily lost, for a purchase of two tires.

There is nothing special with a square dashboard pad with the Bridgestone logo printed on it, so li9ht Brand Communications’ creative team created a distinctive print ad and store banner to make it, at least, look special. We did an ad with a classic shade simply to give the impression that Bridgestone tires have been long in the market. A straight headline that says “Buy 2 Bridgestone Tires and Get a Dashboard Pad for Free”, and straight visual. Our consideration was that the message must be direct without bluff.

CLIENT: PT Bridgestone Tire Indonesia

PROJECT: Print Ad and Store Banner for Sales Promotion

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

Rolling A Drink Bottle with Two Tires

We know by research that consumers want more than simply a product that marketers are selling to them. To keep them loyal to a particular brand, a particular marketer will launch sales promotion programs, either by price deals, loyal reward programs, sweepstakes or any other deals. To pull more consumers to buy Bridgestone tires, the Indonesian marketing office of the Japanese tire brand implemented a loyalty reward program, where consumers will get a Lock & Lock drink bottle for the purchase of two tires.

PT Bridgstone Tire Indonesia invited li9ht Brand Communications to work on the print ad and the store banner that promoted the program. The headline went straight: “Get 1 Cool Drink Bottle By Buying Two Tires”. But li9ht’s creative team went cutting-edge and produced a bent visual, where the two tires were shrunk and formed as if they were the bottle itself with the real cap on top.  

CLIENT: PT Bridgestone Tire Indonesia

PROJECT: Print Ad and Store Banner

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

How to Excavate More Money

Being a member of Trakindo Group of Companies, PT Chandra Sakti Utama Leasing (CSUL) provides its customers the convenience and benefit of having all of their leasing needs under one roof for the purchase of Caterpillar equipment. The company delivers a one-stop financing for the purchase of Caterpillar tractors, loaders, engines, generators, excavators and more, for the construction, mining, forestry, agricultural and energy sectors. Not all prospective customers of CSUL’s parent company, Trakindo, are aware of this freshen service, thus li9ht Brand Communications was called in to conceive and design its marketing kit.

The big idea was very simple. The Caterpillar equipment that customers buy are sometimes utilized for the “digging and dredging” of mining materials that were not known before, so we came up with a single keyword that may represent them all: “unearth” or “excavate”.  By digging into CSUL’s, Trakindo’s customers may find the best financial solutions ever offered to them, which eventually will make their businesses more profitable.  

CLIENT: PT Chandra Sakti Utama Leasing

PROJECT: Corporate Brochure

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

Bridgestone’s Chamois Story

There is nothing too special about a chamois leather cloth: A type of porous leather that is favored for its gentle, non-abrasive composition and absorption properties. Car and motorcycle owners have chamois cloth in their inventory as automotive drying material that is safe on acrylic, lacquer, enamel, and polyurethane paints and clear-coats. For this reason, Bridgestone deemed the chamois leather a suitable free gift in exchange with the purchase of two Bridgestone tires.

For this, Bridgestone hired li9ht Brand Communications to develop concepts for magazine and newspaper print ads and store banners that advertised the sales promotional program. We explored several car owners in Jakarta to find out what they used a chamois leather cloth for, and whether the cloth is worth to get for two not-cheap Bridgestone-branded tires. Well, what do you know, other than to wipe dew or water off their car body, a chamois leather is also used to clean up the dirt that sticks to car windows! These facts became the creative rationale of the above designs.

CLIENT: PT Bridgestone Tire Indonesia

PROJECT: Print Ad and Store Banner for Sales Promotion Program

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

A Colorful Plastic Surgery

What is more to say about plastic products? Now, here is a plastic product manufacturing company, based in Sentul, Bogor, West Java that wanted to have an image finer than its bigger, more popular competitors, while keeping its size small. PT Arkan Indoplast Utama manufactures plastic packaging and other products through blowing as well as injection moulds. Well known brands of shampoos, lubrication, motorcycles, and electronics entrust their packaging and parts to Arkan, while the company, realizing the waste may damage the environment, practices the best approach to occupational health, safety, and environment. There is more to plastics than mere manufacture, so li9ht Brand Communications saw the need for Arkan to undergo a plastic surgery to produce an image that has a finer quality.

The identity development took the form of designing a new logo and improving the looks of the company profile. The logo moved off from the chemical symbol of plastic with the color green to signify Arkan’s care for the environment. It bears the slogan “Beyond Plastics” to affirm the company’s undertaking that goes further than manufacturing plastic products.

The three-fold company profile design reveals a colorful display of products, people, technologies and accents that will be perceived as being a modern and dynamic company with an eye to the future.

CLIENT: PT Arkan Indoplast Utama

PROJECT: Corporate Identity Development

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

Taking A Coal Mining Contractor to the Next Level

The Jakarta-based PT Putra Perkasa Abadi or PPA Coal ventures in the field of coal mining as a contractor. It summoned li9ht Brand Communications’ assistance in developing the company’s visual and verbal identities. Environmental issues have been emerging lately, so we recommended the client to pick it as the central theme. Coal mining has been blamed for environmental damage, so it will be wise to brand PPA Coal as a coal mining contractor that cares for the conservation of the environment. The logo design started off as a stylized form of a coal (represented by the light to dark grey cube) which is overwhelmed by a bigger light green cube that represents the green and clean environment. The entire design connotes that PPA Coal applies a green operation of coal mining.

The kind of typography that we selected for the name of the company gives the impression of being playful so as to make it perceived as a "user-friendly" service company.

The slogan at the bottom literally signifies that customers will be taken into deeper levels of the soil, where the best quality coals are usually found, and it is also an idiom which means “to improve”. In other words, PPA Coal improves the way coal mining is done and it will improve a customer’s coal trade.

CLIENT: PT Putra Perkasa Abadi

PROJECT: Visual and Verbal Identity Development

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro

COPYWRITER: Anto Dwiastoro

The Intellectual and Spiritual Wisdom’s Need for Branding

Folder (Outside)

Folder (Inside)

Flap

The Sumohadiwidjojo Center was founded in December 24, 2011 in Jakarta to promote the study of intellectual and spiritual wisdom for the wellbeing of man and the world. The center submitted a request to li9ht Brand Communications to develop its visual identity and its application on numerous promotional items that were used in a seminar on the subject on June 9, 2012. The logo design started out from the Center’s name initials, i.e. SC. The body of the “S” is shaped by the stylized form of a quill, and the “C” finds itself inside the “S”, which symbolizes that it is the core of the Center’s activity—a study center. The color blue stands for “peace” and “spirituality”, grey for neutrality and yellow being the color of the mind and the intellect.

CLIENT: Sumohadiwidjojo Center

PROJECT: Identity Development

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Anto Dwiastoro