Singapore’s Tissue Packs a Punch in Finland!
In the turn-September 2017 period, 4 groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students from Singapore had the privilege to represent Singapore at the Design Finland 100 Business Case Seminar. We were one of the participating teams.
The four teams were winners of the Design Finland 100 competition, whose aim was to carve out the multi-dynamic strategy of Finland’s top organizations in industries such as e-commerce, food, med-tech, smart technology, retail, IT, and health. The connection between design and trade was approached from the fashion, health technology, digital services as well as service design perspectives. The competition was organized in the top universities across Southeast Asian countries reaching 37 teams, and more than 200 students. The teams studied real-life cases for Finnish partner companies producing go-to-market strategies and customer analyses responding to each company’s unique needs.
We were ‘Team Luomu in Asia’ and we focused on the food industry. ‘Luomu’ means organic in the Finnish language. We posed a challenge to the Finnish companies who attend the Business Case Seminar; to increase export of their organic produce to Singapore with the ultimate goal of putting an organic meal on the table at S$10. Our ideas were pitched around the Singapore food culture and we shared with them the importance of food as a means for the family to get together to connect.
To strike a lasting impression, we decided to share a very important part of the Singapore food culture; the tissue pack. Labeling it as a Singaporean’s Swiss Army knife, we explained how almost every other person in Singapore needed a tissue pack simply due to the heat and humidity. To elaborate on the challenge of scarcity of space and our efficiency, the Finnish people learned about our ‘chope’ culture at the hawker center, much to their delight. Besides being a daily necessity, they learned the potential of tissue-advertising; its reach, penetration, and repetitive messaging. To this end, we must thank Happytissue for their ideas and support. I believe the sample tissue packs we handed out would have impressed and inspired our audiences.