Last night, I chanced upon a meeting with the owner of Carlos Mexican Canteena and his friends.
Though I was only there to meet one of their mutual friend, they started talking about business and investing to which they had me hanging on to their every word.
They started off with some friendly banter on the subject of investing in the new frozen yogurt franchise. Calculating cost, ROI, etc.
Then the owner posed a question. “If you could have a 10% investment to own any franchise of your choice out there, what would it be?”
He goes on to explain a particular famous quote by Warren Buffet
“In business, I look for economic castles protected by
unbreachable ‘moats’.”
-Warren Buffett
What it basically means is that, when building a business (castle) you want to make sure you have as much competitive edge (moat) over your competitors so that it will be hard for them to overtake you.
Take for example Southwest Airlines or Zappos. Their company culture is so unique deeply ingrained in every employee, that no one could copy it, even though everyone kind of knew how it was done.
If your competitors know your secret and yet still can’t copy it, that’s a structural advantage. That’s a moat
This got me thinking about branding.
Businesses are a dime a dozen in order to truly set yourself apart, you need to have your our unique branding…a moat.
If you look at brands like Starbucks, Coke, Apple, you can see that they have build huge moats around their castle. There is no doubt that there are other competitors can build/make better products than theirs but when purchasing is that what we truly want or remember?
In Malaysia, Nuffnang was the first blog advertising platform to emerge.
If one were to string together the best talent for a new ad platform, Nuffnang’s competitive edge over everyone would seem like an uphill task as they have managed to build such a strong moat.
This suddenly brings me back to two articles that I read with regards to social media.
The first is about a Dominos Manager in Chicago who actively uses social media to engage with his customers. For one particular complaint, he even went as far to record a personal apology on video.
If this happened to me in Malaysia, I think I would be speechless.
On a similar note, some restaurants have been using Twitter to fix customers complaints and to listen to their needs.
That’s the beauty of social media these days. It gives an opportunity to business to connect to their customers on a much personal level. To build brand around excellent customer service. And ultimately to widen the moat day by day.
What are some other examples you can think of with regards to businesses in Malaysia?
