Shan Shwe Taung Grows Laphet Market Share to 80% (est)
Key services
Icarus Media provided SST with communication strategy, reputation management, digital marketing and social media management to grow customer base and social engagements and spur rapid expansion of market share for its mainstream products.
By the end of our tenure, SST rose to an influential position in the market justified by KPIs below:
Social Media Reach
Social Engagement
Video Views
Increase In Distribution
Who Is Shan Shwe Taung?
Shan Shwe Taung
Shan Shwe Taung, a fermented-tea-leaf wholesaler, grew from a small market player in 1984 to dominating 80% of Myanmar’s market by the 2000s. Icarus Media served the second generation entrepreneurs from 2016 to 2021.
Challenges We Resolved
When we first started working with Shan Shwe Taung SST, they were going through a big reputation crisis due to fake news spread online about the alleged food hygiene issues in their production process.
- Reputation Management: We strategised their reputation management and ran six month long campaign to restore the brand reputation to the pristine position where it always belonged.
- Counterfeit brand disruption: Battling with counterfeit brands from competitors who were trying to steal SST market in unethical way. It took a meticulous planning of month long campaigns to fend the brand originality as a pioneering brand and drive off the copy cat brands
- Establishing Trust: We strategised to be transparent with the production process, actively shared stories of people behind the product and how diligently they work so that the consumers can enjoy the tasty fermented tea leaf.
- Growth Hacking We worked on year long growth hacking campaigns to expand brand reach both online and offline. Due to this, we were able to reach the right target market and expand consumer base nation wide.
- Consumer friendly social branding: We diligently re-positioned the brand to be a friendly and relatable. The level of social engagement we achieved was on per with global brands like Netflix and KFC social success in Myanmar.
- Market segmentation We strategised to be transparent with the production process, actively shared stories of people behind the product and how diligently they work so that the consumers can enjoy the tasty fermented tea leaf.
What We Delivered
- Reputation Management: Restore and strengthen Shan Shwe Taung’s reputation. For short term, countering misinformation campaigns. For long term, to be more transparent about SST produciton process, people behind the brand and company culture for innovaiton.
- Integrated Marketing Strategy: Develop a holistic marketing approach that aligns the brand's online and offline customer experiences, ensuring consistent messaging and branding across all channels.
- Adaptation to Changing User Behaviors: Continuously monitor and adapt to changing netizen behaviors to stay relevant and engaging, ensuring Shan Shwe Taung remains connected with its target audience.
- Brand Credibility and Expertise: Establish and showcase the brand's expertise and credibility in the fermented tea leaves industry through media exposure, expert thought leadership, and the production of high-quality content such as company profiles and expert interviews.
- Target Market Expansion: Successfully target and penetrate the premium and luxury markets for Myanmar Tea Leaf’s premium addition product-line, Paline, by developing tailored campaigns and initiatives that cater to the preferences and needs of these customer segments.
- Retail Sales Growth: Increase retail sales nationwide by implementing retail-focused campaigns and promotions that drive awareness, generate interest, and encourage purchases of the brand's products.
- Channel Optimization: Optimize the utilization of OTT platforms for reaching modern youth with internet access and leverage cable television to connect with audiences in rural areas, ensuring effective distribution and communication of the brand's messaging.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly assess and identify areas for improvement in marketing strategies, content creation, customer care, and conflict management, to enhance overall performance and ensure the brand's long-term success.
Success Stories
Thin Thin Mwe Saga
In 2020, Laphet products had high demand in Myanmar’s growing market economy. Shu Shae, a budget laphet package, dominated with 80% market share. A competitor, Thin Thin Mwe, copied Shu Shae and promoted the counterfeit brand with influential celebrities. This caused confusion among consumers and affected SST sales and customer satisfaction.
In order to restore the pristine glory of original SST Shu Shae product, Icarus Media consulted
- to create packaging with a tagline ‘Mu La Pathama‘ meaning ‘Original first product’. We educated SST consumers about this tagline on SST packages via six month campaigns.
- produce TV commercials about the “Mula Pathama” as TV is still very popular in rural areas. We handled the project end-to-end from conception – production to delivery.
- Ran many month-long online engagement campaigns to evangelise ‘Mu La Pathama’ ‘Original first product’ trademark on packaging so the audience chose the right product off the shelf
Legal battles are still waging and counterfeit brands are still lurking in the consumer market but SST has successfully managed to re-capture it’s worthy 80% market share within months. Strengthened product packaging and the engaged customers were icing on the cake of this Thin Thin Mwe saga.
Disinfomation & Conflict Management
Due to fake information claiming poor hygiene in production process, Shan Shwe Taung brand image was unfairly damaged. Unfortunately it went viral and the brand reputation came to a critical situation. In order to salvage the brand from nemesis, we did the following actions:
- We captured production process and made it transparent to SST consumers.
- On every encounter with fake news, our team of expert social media managers engaged with audiences to educate about the production process.
- We actively educated our users about the care and attention SST was putting into the production of it’s laphet packages.
- The story of the laphet farmers, the story of the factory workers, the story of our passionate founders worked like a charm to give SST products a human touch and shift the perspective of the consumers on positive spectrum.
- We made the users part of the story as SST started its journey towards ISO certification
Market Expansion & Hacking Growth
Hacking growth requires thinking outside the box. And solving problems that hinder the product growth.
- As a first step, we defined customer segments and brand persona for SST. This gave us a clear focus on our online and offline initiatives.
- Secondly, we developed year long value based campaigns that aligned with the user behaviour and seasonal events.
- Third step, we created high quality images that effectively represented the products for social, TVC and offline campaigns.
The above steps were crucial in running successful campaign like Valentine’s Day, Sharing is Caring campaign. Couples were encouraged to submit their photos of sharing SST laphet to strengthen the traditional social values associated to laphet. This campaign brought a whooping 5.5 million impressions. Social engagement was a healthy 1.8 million like/share/comments/DMs etc.
Other yearlong campaigns like Laphet in Your Life, lifestyle updates campaigns created a community of SST laphet fans for urban and rural societies. Our customers sharing their photos of how SST laphet fit into their daily life was a window of opportunity for SST to innovate their product lines. This helped with both online customer engagements and offline market expansion. Which led to SST securing 80% of mainstream market share by its Shue Shae product alone.
The Results
- Market Dominance: Due to the clever audience segmentation and relatable social campaigns, Shan Shwe Taung grew its mainstream laphet market share to 80% of Myanmar’s market.
- Reputation Management: After careful management of Thin Thin Mwe Saga and Food Hygiene Disinformation issues, SST has grown to be an authentic, reliable brand in the market. Due to the transparency of its process and passion for innovation by the founders, reputation of SST is ever so high among the consumers.
- Segmentation & Growth: A clear market segmentation of SST’s products and it’s consumer base has resulted in
- Annual social media reach of 12.9 million.
- 4 million social engagements.
- Owning 80% market share for Shu Shae laphet product
- Strengthened Brand Identity: After the Thin Thin Mwe Saga, Shan Shwe Taung is now well known as the original creator of “Shu Shae” laphet. The SST products are easier to identify in the market and less vulnerable to the counterfeit products.
- Positive engagement with consumers: Due to the transparency in production process and meticulously planned education campaigns,
- consumer complaints have gone down by 95% and
- the product enquiries have gone up by 1000%.
Let’s discuss how we can collaborate
Congrats on making it all the way down the page! How about we schedule a virtual chat over a nice cup of tea or coffee? We can dive into how we can make your brand shine and take it to the next level of success. Let’s connect and make magic happen!
