Postcard from Singapore

About a year ago, I left the UK and relocated to Singapore to take up a new job as marketing director for an international conference company. So I packed up my belongings, had some vaccinations, and shipped me and my cat out here.

Lovely place; very clean, very tidy, usually well organised, and very verdant. The international airport is new, clean, efficient, and just 20 minutes from the Central Business District. It’s generally 85 – 95 degrees most days, gets light at 7am and dark at 7pm. The cost of living is much cheaper and the income tax is around 15%. Current exchange rate is roughly $3 to £1. So, it should be heaven.

So, international marketing – is it the same, the world over?

No, actually, it takes quite a while to adapt to a new market – and on many different fronts. These are not the things they tell you about on the International Marketing Elective of your MBA:

Staffing

What they cost, how well qualified, their expectations, work ethic, whether they need an employment pass, or a visa. Oh, and the young men you employ can be called away with just a few days notice to 2 – 3 weeks of Reservist Training (they still have National Service here). It doesn’t sound that bad, but when you suddenly have eight guys out of the office at once, it can cause problems. Then there’s a very strange and very local thing here called MC allowance (Medical Certificate) which many see as an extra 14 days paid holiday (usually on Mondays and Fridays). They just have to pay a local GP $20 for a certificate, and we reimburse up to $250 of such costs per quarter, and when it rains, everybody comes in late – up to 40 minutes late, and they don’t apologise or make up the time.

I need to have some staff who can speak Chinese (for marketing the Chinese events), a few with Malay, and the rest is a complete melting pot. For Japanese, we use a professional external translator, and hire-in Japanese speaking telesales temps.

The temp market is quite similar; you have to pay a higher hourly rate for staff through them, and then an extortionate fee if you ask someone to go temp-2-perm.

So – my new head of database is an Indian (who I brought over from India). My latest marketing managers are a Swede from London (relocated), a Pakistani from the Dubai office (a transfer), a Nepali from India, a German (formerly at our Berlin office), another Indian (from Singapore), two local Singaporeans, a Philippine, and the latest addition will be a Malawian, from South Africa.

When I first came out here, I interviewed a lot of local applicants. They would come in, do the one hour maths and English test, and then if that wasn’t hopeless, we’d have a chat. So tell me, what did you study at university, what exactly was the marketing degree comprised of, and talk me through managing a DM campaign. Right, so your degree, from the University of Bath (UK) (or Bristol, or Sheffield, or Edinburgh) was actually done here, you have never been abroad, you don’t read international press, wouldn’t recognise an international C-suite business man if he shook your hand, and you have no idea how to do a direct marketing campaign (I don’t consider media studies, a bit of research and some PR to be marketing). Next....!

The labour laws here are more aligned with the USA than Europe. But the local market has got itself into a right mess, where staff expect a pay rise and job title change just because they have been somewhere for a few months or a year, and as it’s nearly full employment, some companies encourage people to stay by edging up their salaries by a couple of hundred bucks, and a meaningless job title change.

Suppliers

Who, how many, have they heard of service level agreements? Yes, there’s cheaper labour, and a lot more hand operation and bench work, so even if you are familiar with using Spring or DHL, it’s a whole new ball game. If I want several hundred handwritten letters, and hand addressed envelopes, it is possible, and affordable. But they also do mail merge, de dupes, and laser personalised, matched packs too.

Singapore is small, you can drive across it in 45–60 minutes. So there’s not much choice unless you go offshore, and managing suppliers overseas is always tricky. But it means that you cannot afford to fall out with too many people, as you’d use up the supply of suppliers pretty quickly. We use three mailing house, partly because I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, but also so I can spread the load around if we have a busy month. The flip side is that our designers are often sending us back revisions at 6 or 7pm, even on a Friday evening, and our printer will do jobs on a Saturday, with no additional costs.

The design and layout of a six page A4 brochure is around $450, maybe another $50 if there’s a few rounds of revisions; 4 colour print on a 6pp A4 folded brochure (decent stock) around $160/000 or £54/000 (and that’s for a small P.O. of 5K).

The office

I don’t think they do fire regulations / health & safety out here – they definitely don’t have that toilets-per-head quota. And the air conditioning is fierce and centrally managed, so it gets freezing cold most afternoons; if you come in over the weekend, it’s switched off and you will cook. And they don’t understand security they way they do in a London office after a few walk in thefts. They will leave wallets and mobile phones in open display on their desks and in bars. As my regional marketing director was relocating to London recently, we kept hiding his wallet to try and get him used to the change in surroundings!

Data

There seems to be only two major list brokers in the region and neither of them is exactly fast off the blocks when you want a count, let alone any data. And they can’t understand why you don’t think much of compiled data. They have both lost more orders than they have won.

There are actually some local data protection laws out here – if we send an email out to people in Singapore it must have <ADV> at the beginning of the subject line. However, outside of Singapore, it needn’t. We research our names before putting them on our database, we don’t give our data to third parties and we do have opt outs and unsubscribes on everything. I have however had to tell a few of my overzealous colleagues to stop intimidating my list research team, that I will not instruct them to break the law, and that if they want a particular thing done, they can do it themselves, and I hope they enjoy prison food – sales people – same the world over!!

Holidays

There’s Christmas "which isn’t important" (although we shut down for a week), Golden Week (China completely shuts down for two weeks and there’s a massive movement of the population as everyone tries to get home to visit their families), then Chinese New Year (most places ease off for a week or two), and a very interesting mix of various countries’ religious and national holidays to contend with.

Trade Press

It’s very poor here – there’s one magazine – Marketing – and that’s about it – I have all my UK trade press internationally redirected – there’s no equivalent to Marketing Week, Third Sector, Data Strategy, InCirculation etc. So I download articles, bookmark websites, and take in magazines to the office, including Time, Newsweek, the Week, just to try and broaden some horizons.

Face

It’s a big thing out here – and it manifests itself in that they won’t speak up, they won’t question, they won’t hold a position / argument / point of view, and getting feedback from them is nearly impossible. You feel like shaking them, just to get a reaction. And, as their boss, you do have to be careful about not making them lose face in front of others.

They don’t have the strength of the Institutes out here. I am one of the three IDM folk here, and the CIM who have a local presence, when asked about recruitment, just referred me to the local equivalent of Monster.co.uk

I went to the British Chamber of Commerce Christmas party and mixed with the other eight people who came along.

Finding people with an international perspective is tough, unless they have lived, worked or studied abroad. There are newspapers here, but basically it’s controlled by one big state run publishing company (and phone company, and broadcasting company), so unless you are prepared to purchase the more expensive international press (which at least they do allow in) you can live a very narrow existence, and be patronised rather a lot in a public service announcement kind of way. Most business people read the Straits Times and or Asian Wall Street Journal. I do a lot of proofing and copy checking out here and one of my rules is that a document is either in English (s’s) or in American (z’s) but not in a mix of the two (unless one is in American, with an English speaker, who’s biog is in English (defence and defense)).

Censorship & local laws

You can pay for cable TV, and get CNN, CNBC, BBC World, and Sky news, and it’s good fun to channel flick and watch the different takes on the same story – and there’s Asian News today. All TV is censored and I’m told that films shown at the cinemas can have chunks missing from them too.

And I’m not joking – Singapore still has the death penalty – I think they executed just under 100 people last year – mainly for serious crimes / drug offences etc, so it’s not a country to be on the wrong side of the law. And if your Employment Pass is revoked, I think you have seven days to quit the country, after having proved that you have paid your income tax right up to date. In fact, if you hand in notice here (as a foreigner), your employer, by law, withholds your final month’s salary, until your tax has been paid.

One good thing about this location is that you can easily hold your events in Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, or Korea and people seem to enjoy the travelling – some countries are best for certain events / industries / months / topics, but as the hotel prices have risen steeply in Singapore over the past 12 months, (and you can’t get a room in September when the GP is on anyway) it gives us lots of local alternatives. And, if it’s not in Singapore, they don’t have to pay the extra 7% GST tax.

So – some things are the same the world over – staff – biggest cost, biggest drain, best leverage. Data selections and data manipulation – yes, different system, same theory. But some things are different: scale, scope, opportunity, emerging topics, where various things are in their product life cycle, and the lovely low cost of materials, suppliers, postage, print, and hand written outers!