Tricor Group’s award-winning brand relaunch: Q&A with Tricor Group CMO Sunshine Farzan

This post is sponsored by Tricor Group.

The global marketing and communications team from Tricor Group, Asia’s leading business expansion specialist, was recently recognised among the winners at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s PR Awards 2022.

The team’s successful award entry – aptly named “Awakening the sleeping giant – the Tricor story: Home-grown brand finds its voice through regional PR relaunch” – won in the category of Best Use of Content. 

Notably, over the past few years since the rebrand, Tricor has received around 30 industry awards globally, with a third of them in recognition of marketing and communications excellence.

The PR and content strategy has been particularly impactful, serving as a critical component of relaunching and repositioning Tricor’s brand. Highlights include elevating brand awareness to achieve 45% share of voice, and uplifting the brand’s reputation among the media with Tier 1 media outlets accounting for about 60% of all media coverage.

To learn more about Tricor’s award-winning rebrand and PR blitz, we interviewed Sunshine Farzan, group head of marketing and communications.

Why did Tricor undergo a brand relaunch? What underpinned the effort?

Despite Tricor’s long-standing successful track record of supporting businesses across APAC, our brand awareness remained surprisingly low. Tricor had essentially flown under the radar in a highly competitive landscape dominated by the Big Four firms.

We kept asking ourselves: “How can an APAC heritage brand – with more than 20 years of experience servicing more than 50,000 clients and supporting roughly half of the IPOs across Asia’s main stock exchanges – be so unknown?”

The answer was the firm had not invested in promoting the brand, and lacked a dedicated PR and differentiated content strategy to effectively reach and engage customers, prospects, and the media.  

A fundamental component of the relaunch was our positioning of the “Tricor Story” through regional B2B PR efforts, calling attention to the firm’s deep APAC experience and status as a proud home-grown APAC challenger brand.

Strategically, this brand narrative aligns with Tricor’s forte in providing companies with local expertise and specialised knowledge – and supporting our clients’ business expansion ambitions across APAC.  

What were the key objectives of the brand, and the PR relaunch?

We aimed to raise Tricor’s brand profile among Tier 1 media, influencers, customers, prospects, and partners in our core markets – especially in Greater China and ASEAN.

We primarily concentrated on three integrated objectives. The first was to creatively leverage social media to amplify brand awareness, tell our story and raise credibility. Another objective was to generate positive, impactful and relevant thought leadership content. The final objective was to raise Tricor’s profile in key target markets as a customer-focused firm, a trusted partner, and an industry thought leader.

What channels did you use to drive the campaign?

Given the range of Tricor’s global and industry-diverse audience, our team amplified the impact of PR activities with a multichannel, multiplatform, trilingual content strategy across paid media, earned media, and owned channels. This expanded our reach across the media, broadening the scope of audiences we engaged, and allowing for greater control and tailoring of the message.

What topics were used to tell the Tricor story?

By focusing on the two pillars – targeted media outreach and data-driven PR – we joined the most pressing conversations and captured media attention around the hottest topics shaping the business and media landscape. These included, to name a few, business resilience amid pandemic uncertainties, the global trade outlook, rapid IPO shifts, digital transformation, and ESG.

What was your biggest learning takeaway?

Ultimately, we are very proud of these results because they demonstrate how cost-effective, creative use of digital and social platforms can help APAC challenger brands disrupt the marketplace and compete with high budget brands and PR efforts of multinational conglomerates.