Branding For Bursa

I was talking with a friend on how many government and semi government bodies needed to brand themselves just like the private sector companies. We remember the branding by Standard Chartered Bank of old. Who can forget the very effective slogan/branding:

Standard Chartered
BIG, STRONG & FRIENDLY

That worked well, very well indeed. A lot of companies nowadays do not stand for anything, if you do not know what drives at the core of your company, you do not deserve the full value of how well your company is doing, because you did not appreciate how/why the company did well. So, these companies will be doomed when trouble and strife come-a-looking for them. If you did not know why you did well, you will not know what to do when the shit hits the fan. Good fortune comes more from good luck for these companies rather than from good planning and execution.

If you ask CIMB's top management about their branding and core values, you can bet they have an answer, and their strategy to get to where they are now is not by accident. It is easy for all companies to say employees are the core of the company, but what did the company do to "execute as a strategy". Just look at CIMB, recruited well, pay even better, empower them to allow them to dictate terms and grow their units, do not micro-manage ... Just looking at the first few items, most companies would not even get their gears started - but they will mouth them in annual reports and emblazoned them as corporate slogans. That's also why most GLCs fail, the failure to incorporate ideals/objectives with execution ability. Many can write well and come up with reams of good thoughts (i.e. Mahathirism to the max), execution... well, if it happens, its more due to luck rather than good planning and execution.

So, for Bursa Malaysia, the branding/slogan would look something like this

Bursa Malaysia
DEFENSIVE, HIGH YIELDING & LAGGARD

Actually, the first two are good things, we are defensive nowadays due to the good fundamentals surrounding the ringgit, good trade figures and surpluses and room for more appreciation over the next 2 years. High yielding, well, I have already mentioned that we pay the best dividends in the region. Laggard, well, that speaks for itself. Some say that the reason why the local index is a laggard is because it is weighted excessively towards the few big stocks, i.e. the top 10% probably determine 50-60% of the index component. Hence the poor performance of these group will skew the performance of the whole group. Yes, that might be the case, but there are big and small companies as well in every country. Why are the big ones in our country not performing well? We got gas, we got oil, we got oil palm ... all did spectacularly well over the last 3 years and still we look like Bangladesh Stock Exchange. Big or small may skew the index but it does not detract from overall poor performance.