course material

1. FHE6004 Digital Advertising Branding Campaigning
Answers:
Introduction
In today’s rapidly changing and dynamic business environment, companies are becoming
competitive through building a brand cheaper, faster, and bigger. It involves generating
awareness, social and digital media provide the means of getting new products in front of
customers easily and quickly. E-commerce platforms are eagerly anticipating for matching
products to customers for distribution and facilitating transactions (swaminathan, 2016).
There are reviews engines as well for providing valuable feedback for brands to engage,
listen, and iterate in a rapid and responsive product development cycle. There are other
factors too that defines the changing brand ambitions and manufacturers adjusting for
staying relevant. Companies are building better brand portfolio, leveraging their supply
chain and infrastructure for creating efficiencies and then building a market engine on top
of that for differentiating the products from competitors (leigh, 2021). The aim of this
report is to analyse singapore airlines (sia) branding efforts in terms of building brand
equity, brand management across geographical regions, and time and the utilisation of
digital tools in a digital era. This report includes comparison of the company with its key
competitors as well while making recommendations regarding the way company will be
able for undertaking more effective strategic brand management approach.
Branding In A Digital Era
In a digital era, brand success is used for being measured in distribution and revenue with
the goal for creating a billion-dollar brand. Companies are targeting consumers through
making a digital reach for audience growth; also, the use of social media is revamping the
way brands are introducing and interacting with consumers. This ability of connecting their
products with the right consumers define digital advertising, involving influencers and
social media to ensure success (gielens & steenkamp, 2019). It involves an importance of
brand accountability as well to consumers where the power dynamics has been shifted
towards consumers while having unlimited options.
About Singapore Airlines

2. Singapore airlines (sia) is the flag carrier airline, having a hub at singapore changi airport
and using the singapore girl as its central figure in corporate branding. It is an excellence,
iconic asian brand while having a poise and elegant crew that became a hallmark of
consistent brand delivery. Across the globe, sia earned recognition for singapore for
promoting similar attributes in their products, staff, and services. The country building its
brand attribute of reliability where sia is the torchbearer, playing a leadership role in
building brand singapore (song, 2021). As a brand, sia is committed towards the consistent
enhancement of the three main pillars of its brand promise that includes product
leadership, service excellence, and network connectivity. The company ensure achieving the
best of both worlds of service excellence and low-cost operations model along with building
brand awareness through social media and content marketing. This helps in generating
future opportunity for the company while having more capacity in the global market along
withstanding out as a premium brand among its competition (steenkamp, 2020). Sia is
using ai (artificial intelligence) as well for building its brand and driving sales; for instance,
launching new digital campaign while better targeting new customers and focusing on its
marketing efforts. Also, it involves creativity in designing key messages to deliver for the
banner adverts powered through its technology partner with appropriate frequency and
network. The company also ensure optimisation while performing innovatively and
creatively along with premium economy offering, sale fares, and food and beverage
onboard, generating most clicks.
Company’s Branding Efforts
Sia’s stellar service makes the company a world-class travel brand, providing luxurious
flight experiences across cabin classes, with spacious cabins, state-of-the-art entertainment
options, and a commitment to making flying a personal experience. The singapore girl
define the brand strategy of sia that involves recognising the strong emotional connection of
customers with the brand due to its iconic image (danao, 2018). The company’s campaigns
and ads are taking varying forms while carrying different messages over the course of time,
but through it all. It is based on the way singapore girl present to promote the latest
products, launch a new destination, or introduce a new aircraft. Sia’s marketing campaigns
includes for instance, advertisements to feature its cabin products while informing traveling
public regarding their new innovations (jeon & dodd, 2013). Another example of
advertisement is of showcasing several locations to which the company operate. This
campaign of singapore girl is aiming towards reinforcing sia forte to be the best in-flight
service across the globe.
Moreover, the company is aware regarding its product and price, being strong factors
influencing consumer patterns. The singapore girl ad campaign is built, symbolising sia’s
asian hospitality and world-class service standards; also, to epitomise the care and warmth
for customers, as expected by the company. This ad’s campaign essence remains timeless
and long-standing, holding the company’s traditional values of service along with its
association with the warm hospitality (sah, 2018). It brings out the romance of travel to life

3. while presenting the diversity of the destinations being served. The different locations
include jaisalmer in india, san francisco, wuzhen in china, and paris that were filmed by sia
among their unique character that ensures a strong and iconic backdrop to fit for the
singapore girl overall. Sia released its first advertisement on youtube, having over 220,000
views through adopting an integrated marketing campaign approach to digital platforms
and advertising. It played a key role in all promotional campaigns of sia; also, the company’s
online activities include selected social media channels, relevant to complement with the
traditional media channels (sia, 2013). These are used for ensuring that the advertising
message reaches consumers at several touchpoints.
Other than this, the company ensure recognising people, increasing obtaining information
based on their interests and sharing thoughts by new media platforms like youtube as
dynamic mechanisms. The purpose of serving videos that are released on youtube is based
on seeing great interest from the public in terms of the way ads are put together. Sia
thought of sharing ‘behind the scenes’ moments as a better way of introducing its latest ad
campaign (bapna, 2021). Youtube as a digital platform is borderless in nature that does not
require a fixed geographical location for accessing an ad and to wait for it to come on at a
certain day or time. It is considered as an easy source, allowing sia to further bridge a gap
among service provider and consumer. The singapore girl is iconic and became the
cornerstone of the sia brand philosophy from long while focusing highly on service
qualities, possessed by its cabin crew. Both mail and female employees has sarong kebaya
uniform that makes a difference while becoming a global marketing icon (lim, 2021). Sia is
recognised as one of the most prominent figures in the airline industry and singapore
overall through the effective branding efforts as the singapore girl.
Sia’s consistency is one of its key strengths where customers expect a certain standard of
service and delivery. It is challenging for the company to ensure replicating such consistent
levels of delivery over their overall population of the cabin crew, but sia ensure this through
having over the crew of 8,000 people, more than one third of them male. The singapore girl
worked as a fixture in sia’s ads while possessing the core value of world class service and
ensuring success with the most friendly and attentive staff (ong, 2018). Sia create a great
brand while living up to the service expectations by the customers; also, the company’s
advertising serves reminding people regarding the high levels of service, providing to the
customers and needs to work while living up to those expectations in delivery. This defines
the brand image of sia while constantly stiving towards meeting the highest standards of
customer service and care, fulfilling their promise of being “a great way to fly”. The
company ensure product innovation, customer service, and network connectivity as the key
pillars, forming the foundation of its competitive offering (cheen, 2020). Sia is committed
towards constant innovation and improvement in product and service offerings for
providing its customers with the very best premium air travel experience.
Sia became an industry leader which involves no resting on the laurels after introducing
new products but moving forward through continuous seeking feedback and comments

4. from their customers for improving its products and services, staying ahead of the
game (maszczynski, 2019). The company’s greatest asset is their people and sia ensure
investing in them by training along with carrying on with their brand equity growth for
ensuring that the singapore girl as the hallmark of gracious service and innovative products
of sia remains relevant and timeless in the minds and hearts of its customers (schlappig,
2021). Other than this, sia ensure a sustainable brand differentiation through its brand
strategy as the singapore girl is sustainable for the company while having the widest
business class bed across the globe, compared to its one of the competitors emirates, qantas
group, china airlines, oman air, turkish airlines, and others in terms of product
differentiation and having that unique essence.
Sia ensure maintaining its competition in the cut price market and market share while being
successful in relation to both a dual brand strategy development and operational efficiency
in the airline industry. There are different competencies of the company to achieve from
employee branding, positioning, and meeting customer value uniquely compared to its
competitors. Sia is defined as one of the best examples in hospitality branding while
focusing on employee branding for revamping their operational structure when facing any
external influences or internal cost pressures (james, 2019). Sia established and valued a
strong relationship with its employees, mainly their flight attendants in terms of being
committed to their high-quality services and delivering the brand promise to its customers.
Compared to its competitors, sia differentiate itself in terms of both a strong relationship
with customers and flight attendants, and the exceptional service provision. This led
towards attracting new customers and increasing its brand recognition along with retaining
customer loyalty overall. The company’s constant advertising strategy of the singapore girl
depicted the typical female sia flight attendant who is dressed in the different sarong
kebaya, defined as a simplified version of the traditional attire of malaysia (tee, 2021).
Furthermore, this turned out to be a marketing tool for the company that worked so well
and become of the competitive advantages for sia. Along with ensuring a clear image
associated with high-quality service in an extremely competitive industry defines the slim
profit margins for the company as well. Sia ensure recruiting the right people, having right
attitude, and assessing their fit in its brand image (clark, 2021). Also, the company ensure
developing the branding enthusiasm among its workforce with the help of unstructured and
structured training programs. This leads towards creating a positive impact on an
individual performance and employee commitment towards the organizational goals. Also,
this defines the way sia builds a brand from inside out over all communication points of
delivering an effective and constant pr and advertising messages depicted through the
brand icon, singapore girl. One of its branding efforts include recruitment as well in terms of
having clear strategies to first market the brand to its employees. Sia is a customer-oriented
company, spending a substantial amount of expense and time to find qualified service
personnel. The launching of wax figure of iconic singapore girl in madame tussauds
singapore is also one of the branding efforts of sia, defining epitome of hospitality and
grace (singapore airlines, 2015). This attract customers at large, aiming towards

5. showcasing the best of singapore as an aspect of marketing while representing, being a
leading asian brand.
While making a deliberate decision, sia incorporate the new motif in upcoming branding
and marketing assets as well. There is an involvement of employee communication that
helps in building the mission and corporate values of sia. Also, the company puts branding
efforts in promoting strategic values with the need of managerial attention towards the
crew members for interacting directly with customers based on the feedback reports. Sia
ensure brand reputation management where the singapore girl has become a very powerful
idea of its brand strategy along with becoming a successful brand icon (wang, 2016). The
company ensure working with accuracy and consistency when using a brand colour scheme
for branding employees as well. There are continuous reinforcement and training programs
while aligning physical impressions with brand recognition. This requires building trust
through being a solid brand as a leader in their industry and position. It also requires
effectiveness and involvement through communication while ensuring to integrate all
marketing activities and consistency to delivery its products and services overall (lin,
2015). The overall purpose of sia’s branding efforts is designed regarding increasing its
reputation in terms of being an ultimate hospitality brand.
Furthermore, this defines the company’s adoption of process to create, manage, and
communicate employee branding, having a powerful influence on the way people feeling in
relation to its products and services. The singapore girl defined a brilliant personification of
sia’s commitment to service excellence while developing brand recognition and building
reputation. In this digital era, sia focused on best technology, innovation, and to offer
excellence customer service and genuine quality through branding (bwo, 2021). It involves
brand management practices to build the brand, considering promotional activities and
offering personalised customer services. The company invested in several innovative
activities and retraining employees while putting branding efforts to revamp. It involved
using social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, and more. After
the singapore girl, the company launched a “the lengths we go to” Campaign for showcasing
the commitment of sia to put its customers first in all its actions (hicks, 2013). Also, this ad
campaign emphasised the efforts of the company for providing excellent service along with
ensuring brand management across geographical regions and building brand equity while
utilising time and digital tools overall.
Another new brand campaign launched was “we look forward to seeing you in the air again”
For winning over the minds, hearts, and wallets of passengers. Sia launched this campaign
with a 30-second video while addressing the understandable excitement regarding the
long-awaited reopening of international borders after the covid-19 pandemic. Also, several
customers were waiting to start making travelling plans again that requires sia to ensure
making the in-flight and on-ground experience better (thomas, 2021). During this period,
the company scrapped ‘flights to nowhere’ idea to be replaced with new offerings; however,
failed to consider the environmental impacts to consumer jet fuel for appeasing a group of

6. restless travellers without a destination in mind. This led towards making decision to
conduct a comprehensive review and market study, considering financial viability,
environmental implications, and feedback from the public (ragavan, 2020). It defined the
marketing plans of sia and putting branding efforts through rolling out new brand
campaigns, and unveiling video on sia’s website, youtube, instagram, and facebook pages.
Discussion And Conclusions
Overall, sia focused on what is important along with consistent building positive branding,
accept criticism positively, and re-targeting creatively. Across the globe, branding in a
digital era is about putting efforts through focusing on customers, being agile, rethinking on
other related opportunities for offering product or service, and being open to criticism. The
company is recognised as the standard of quality service compared to its key competitors
like emirates, qantas group, china airlines, turkish airlines, oman airlines, and others. Sia
ensure continuous growth on the singapore girl ensuring image along with having the
extraordinary standards of service and service-related innovations introduction. Based on
the above observations, it can be concluded that the company has a successful and unique
branding strategy while using effectively integrated customer preferences into external
communication along with ensuring long-term growth. However, there is a need of certain
recommendations that sia should undertake, ensuring more effective strategic brand
management approach. This includes that the company should improve the environmental
concerns, impacting the brand image and requires investing digitally for better outcomes.
Sia should work on its sustainability aspect as well while providing an appropriate message
through using social media platforms and achieving to be the world’s leading digital airline
effectively. While staying ahead in the game, the company should world highly among its
key competitors through utilising digital tools and managing to build brand equity overall.
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