*This blog post was written by Maybel Chan, Head of Marketing for Teleport in conjunction with Teleport’s latest 360 branding campaign, “Never on Time, Always Early” – which was created to amplify our positioning and mission to move things across Southeast Asia better than anyone else.
We don’t like boxes
B2B marketing has always been looked at as the less sexy sibling of consumer marketing. On top of that, B2B marketing for logistics? I can hear the surge of excitement over this one. But what we forget is that 46% of all B2B buyers or customers today are millennials. Even in Teleport itself, 50% of our team are under 30. So perhaps the playbook has to be re-written as to what B2B marketing is. Our approach right off the bat was to be fluid and unconventional with how we market ourselves. We wanted Teleport to emerge from the invisible logistics layer.
Sticking to our key value of being bold and aiming high, we never intended to play by a set of rules and it’s taken us a year to set up an end to end internal integrated team that looks at everything, from marketing communications to digital marketing to creatives. We still have a bit to go when it comes to what else we can do but it was clear from the beginning that in order to be a standout, we needed a team of people that’d play outside the box. People who’re willing to take intelligent risks and look at the playing field differently.
The Teleport brand
Black, bold, and a stand out name. Bless us. That brand name tells you that we’re all about moving things really fast from one place to another. The simplicity of black and white depicts the ease in what we do. However, not many had heard of us and you could say that we’ve been playing behind the scenes as a logistics brand. We’ve come quite a ways as the logistics arm of Capital A, starting off with only the air freight business back in 2018 to building last mile delivery, domestically and internationally right up to your doorstep in 24 hours during the pandemic years. So while we’re strengthening that infrastructure with great bones in the brand CI, towards the end of last year we felt that it was time to be bold, step out into the light and put some meat on the bones.
From ‘A to B, Magically’ to ‘Made to Deliver’
Now, how do we tell people what we do? Creative and positioning wise, we’ve evolved. To support the brand name, the first thing was to have a good look at our A to B, Magically tagline. It was ambitious in wanting to depict us as being able to Teleport something from A to B, just like magic. However, as a relatively unknown brand, did it tell people that we’re building our infrastructure and business specifically as an end to end logistics brand that’s made to move things across cities and countries in Southeast Asia faster and better than anyone? Perhaps a little ambiguous. Although we want to still make magic happen, we wanted people to know that Teleport was conceptualised, built, constructed, shaped and Made to Deliver. From first to last mile, from people to technology and operations. That’s what we’re made to do. Therefore, the first bold move was to strengthen the message around the service and infrastructure.
“Never On Time, Always Early“
To deliver the message, we wanted a brand campaign to kick off the positioning with a story about speed. To ‘Teleport it’ is to set a new benchmark for being “on time” by being faster than the industry standard. And that standard is 24 hours across anywhere, any city in Southeast Asia. That’s the ambition we’re making real. Why? Because it’s valuable to both the end customer and to the market. Who wouldn’t want their purchases in Shopee to reach them in 24 hours? We knew that as a logistics company, we needed both online and offline campaign presence as the experience cuts through both. Therefore we looked at brand opportunities across owned and paid vehicles, billboards in key areas and digital platforms.
Lastly: Repetition, repetition, repetition.
When you want to get the girl that’s out of your league, you don’t just try once and succeed… unless you look like Brad Pitt. You gotta put in the work again and again. You gotta stand out in some way and play your best hits on repeat. You may not have a lot of money, but you need to know what swag to put on so that she notices you. You gotta show her (and sometimes tell her) that you’ve got all the goods. It’s a simple premise but you gotta put the work in.
So similarly, we had to decide where we were going to show our swag and how we had to ensure it’s the same clear messaging that’s repeated and seen again and again. It doesn’t really stop with 1 brand campaign. It starts from there, but if we put in the work, where we take it repeatedly and consistently will determine if we finally get the girl.
We also placed digital ads in the city!
We even created an AR Instagram Filter in conjunction with Hari Raya – one of the major festivals of the year!
It doesn’t end here of course. What’s next for us is looking at differentiated branded experiences, country by country positioning and campaigning and continued engagement. So watch this space for more and check out the many ways we’re Made to Deliver beyond just deliveries
Want to know more about us after seeing our campaign? Visit: https://www.teleport.asia/en/my
