Today's Issue
- Editor's Take:
- Article: Generation Marketing and the Youth as Entrepreneurs
- Testimonial Callout
- Events: Corporate Culture: Filipino Values in the Workplace (Monday 9 January), How to Start a Business (Monday 9 January), 5S of Good Housekeeping (Friday 12 January), How to Make a Fortune in Online Forex Trading (Friday 12 January to Friday 9 February), 2nd World Pyro Olympics (Friday 12 and Saturday 13 January), Business Startup Seminar Series for New Entrepreneurs (Saturday 13 January to Saturday 24 February)
Generation Marketing and the Youth as Entrepreneurs
A growing number of young entrepreneurs are steadily making their mark in the local business community. Many are poised to become the new taipans of Philippine business in the next 10 years. These young entrepreneurs have a fresh outlook for what a small and medium enterprise should develop for a product idea that would generate the highest purchase appeal from a specific generation of buyers—in most cases, their age group.
Fashion, music, personal care services, Internet gaming development, food and beverage are some of the popular business categories whose products target the generation of Twenty-Somethings.
Many of today’s young Filipino entrepreneurs are products of their parents from whom they have imbibed the initial business outlook and skills. Some would have been members of JEMA (Junior Entrepreneurs Marketing Association) the campus based national organization of business management and marketing students whose skills are specially sharpened by professional mentors.
To read more, click here!
Testimonial Callout
For those who want to share their thoughts, just simply send us an email to info@sme.com.ph and place on the Subject header: SME Testimonial. The best testimonial will also be featured in our SME.com.ph Web site.
Editor's Take
Business is about risk. And risk is what entrepreneurs thrive on. Taking risks in business is like the adventure sports enthusiast who continues to put the self to new tests.
Before landing the contract to supply the Starbucks coffee chain in the Philippines with fresh milk in 1996, entrepreneur Johnny Katigbak turned a deaf ear to critical remarks about his dogged determination to help save the Philippine dairy industry-even if this meant gathering the grass himself to feed his milk herd, keep their Batangas-based pasteurization plant afloat and get the company out of debt.
Fresh milk isn't popular because it doesn't keep very long. But it was this weakness that also contained its strength. Fresh cow's milk produces froth and Starbucks only serves fresh milk with its trademark coffee.
So with a makeshift refrigerated van put together from spare plant equipment, Katigbak put the vehicle to its rounds in Ayala, the country's financial center, with the MilkJoy brand name printed on sheets of computer printout glued to its side panel.
Seventeen months into the deal with Starbucks, the fledgling company was finally payoff a government loan and release dividends to stockholders equivalent to their paid up capital. By that time, Batangas Agribusiness Corporation and its dairy cooperative was producing a quarter of the country's fresh milk. Katigbak's company now ranks among the most successful enterprises in the country and is keen to branch into other fields of dairy production.
For the entrepreneur, the experience of failure only strengthens resolve. Armed with an indomitable spirit, entrepreneurs like Johnny Katigbak refuse to get bitter, transforming their potential discouragement or embarrassment into the drive to do better.
Or as a proverb in the Far East teaches "Fall seven times, get up eight"-the hallmark of a true entrepreneur.
Russelle S. Trinidad
SME BizLink Editor
