Will they TWiG?

Christine Tan’s Managing Asia series on CNBC is always interesting as it attempts to display Asia’s business at its best. The item shown on Sunday February 23rd, an interview with Taha Bouqdib (TB), the Co-Founder and President of TWG Tea, was more fawning than usual.

TWG Tea was founded by TB and Manoj Murjani, when TB came to Singapore in 2007. The tea business opened in 2008. So how has it been so successful in such a short time? Perhaps it’s all in the name.

Singaporeans love three letter acronyms or abbreviations be it HDB, PAP, CTE, AMK etc. There’s a world famous tea brand named after a Mr Twining. What if we take the three key consonants from that name, and start with the “T” and end with the “G”. Not to be confused with Twinings, of course, but let’s call it TWG.

Singaporeans are also suckers for brands - although they still have trouble distinguishing between fake and genuine Rolex watches or between real and rip-off Louis Vuitton handbags. So hopefully they will confuse TWG with Twinings.

To be a brand in Singapore, all you need is more than one outlet. So simply rent two or three shops from the start and in Singaporeans’ eyes, you are now a brand.

Trusted brands tend to have a long track record. Twinings was founded in London in 1706, over 300 years ago. How does TWG compete with that? Simple, just invent some heritage.

The oldest TWG can be is 1819, when Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore. OK, so let’s add a few years to that. How about printing 1837 on all our packaging and signage so that customers think we are steeped in tradition, dating back over 170 years?

Of course, Ms Tan didn’t actually address the choice of name or the implied provenance of the company in the interview. In fact, her best question to TB was, “How do you protect your brands from copycats in China?”.

I think she would have done better asking Twinings that.