Ginebra says it welcomes competition

Ginebra San Miguel, Inc. (GSMI) welcomed yesterday the growing competition within the booming gin market expressing belief it will benefit consumers since it will drive the industry to continually enhance products and services.

GSMI legal counsel Gilbert Reyes of the Poblador, Bautista and Reyes Law Offices said the company supports the entry of new products by competitors since this development "tends to sharpen product and brand loyalty".

The more choices there are, the more the market-preferred product stands out, Reyes said.

The local gin market is growing at an average of about eight percent annually so there is a lot of room for competition, he added.

Reyes said, however, that new gin market entrants "must try their best to differentiate their products from the market leader." He lamented the trend in the gin industry where new products are allegedly "designed to resemble the market leader in both physical appearance and branding".

It appears that this "copy-cat phenomenon is more prevalent in the gin industry than in other sectors where competition is intensifying." He said the fight for market share in other industries "is marked by efforts to make competing products distinctive."

We are puzzled why new entrants in the gin market always insist on the tactic of "close resemblance", Reyes said. This is manifested in the prevalent use by others of the basic Ginebra San Miguel bottle design and the use of the word Ginebra‚ in the brand name.

We are calling on the industry to experiment with other bottle designs and to use the generic word gin‚ in their brand name, he said. A radical distinction from the Ginebra San Miguel name and design by new entrants could help the market sharpen their choice, Reyes said.

He said "the gin market is not empowered when it is confused". Apparently, the absence of sharp product and brand distinction in the industry today has triggered a market confusion phenomenon where buyers tend to think that other products with the Ginebra brand are made by GSMI.

This is backed by independent studies and we admit this is the cost of market leadership, Reyes said. This could be unfair to GSMI, however, because other players in the industry would be unjustly benefiting from our market goodwill built over the last century, he explained.